
Class 
Book. 



Gojp^itN 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The New Idolatry 



The New Idolatry 



AND OTHER DISCUSSIONS 



BY 



WASHINGTON GLADDEN 




NEW YORK 

McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 

MCMV 



<{V 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 29 1905 

Copyright Entry 
CLASS Ct XXc. No. 

ISX 333 

COPY B. 



8 R 5.25* 

.(Sr-r 



Copyright, 1905, by 
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 

Published, November, 1905, N 



Prefatory Note 



1 HE papers which have been brought together 
in this volume deal with questions of social moral- 
ity which are now receiving much attention from 
the American people. The second paper was 
printed in the Outlook, November 30,1895; the 
date may indicate that the author's convictions on 
the subject under discussion are not of recent 
origin. Several of the others have been called 
forth in connection with events still fresh in the 
public mind. 

The burden of these discussions rests upon the 
problems raised by the rapid accumulation of 
wealth in this country, and by the manner in which 
its use and distribution affect the characters of 
men, and the institutions of religion, education 
and government. They have been written and 
spoken under a deep conviction that the ethical 
principles which should govern our conduct in all 

[vii] 



PREFATORY NOTE 

these matters have been greatly confused and need 

to be cleared and enforced. 

The promiscuous character of this collection will 

explain occasional repetitions; the author justifies 

himself with the reflection that some true things 

need to be said over many times. 

Washington Gladden. 
Columbus, Ohio, 

October 24, 1905. 



[viii] 



Contents 




PAGE 

Preface <, . v 

The New Idolatry 1 

Tainted Money 15 

Standard Oil and Foreign Missions . 30 
Shall Ill-gotten Gains Be Sought for 

Christian Purposes? 53 

The Ethics of Luxurious Expenditure 89 
The Church and the Nation . . . .119 

Religion and Democracy 155 

Rights and Duties 179 

The New Century and the New Nation 217 
The Prince of Life 245 



[xi] 



The New Idolatry 



VV HAT is the trouble with this present world ? 

It is its lack of religion. 

The one thing that the world needs is the res- 
toration of religion to its rightful place in the life of 
the people. 

Especially is this true of the nation. Doubtless 
the nation needs better government, better and 
wiser legislation, better systems of taxation, a bet- 
ter industrial organization, better education, better 
sanitation; but beneath and above and beyond all 
these it needs religion in the hearts of the people. 
Without this none of these things is possible. 

I do not say that we want any establishment of 
religion by law; we want nothing of the kind; it is 
only the husk and shell of religion that can ever 
be established by law. 

It is not Protestantism, nor Congregationalism, 
nor Evangelical Orthodoxy, nor Liberalism; it is 

[3] 



THE NEW IDOLAfR¥ 
not the old theology nor the newjfcheology; it is 
not belief or disbelief in the literal infallibility of 
the Bible, that we most want; some of these things 
may be better than others, but the filing that we 
need is deeper and more fundamental than any or 
all of them : it is religion. 

What is religion ? In its most primary sense it is 
a conviction that the spiritual world is the real 
world, and that the material world is temporary 
and ephemeral; that the things which are unseen, 
like truth, purity, honour, justice, integrity, fidelity, 
unselfish love, are the only enduring realities, 
while the things that can be seen and handled and 
weighed and counted are phantasms and vanities. 
Religion, as Professor James has told us, is, funda- 
mentally, the realization "that the physical uni- 
verse is part of a more spiritual universe from 
which it draws its chief significance," and that 
"union or harmonious relation with that higher 
universe is our true end. " 

Of that "more spiritual universe," whose un- 
seen realities are such as I have mentioned, God is 
the Life and the Light. His name is the great 
name which stands for all these things, in their per- 

[4] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

fection. Truth, justice, purity, love, are not ab- 
stractions, they are personal qualities. To believe 
that they exist, in their perfection, is to believe in 
God. To believe that they are the supreme reali- 
ties and to govern our lives by this belief is the sub- 
stance of what we mean by religion. 

There can be no question that the men who laid 
the foundations of our national life were men to 
whom religion was the supreme reality. They had 
no doubt that justice and truth and righteousness, 
which are the habitation of God's throne, are the 
ruling forces on earth as well as in heaven. It is 
this faith which has been greatly weakened in this 
generation, and which needs to be restored. 

I have said that what the world needs to-day is 
religion; it would have been truer, perhaps, to say 
the true religion. Religion of some sort it has; and 
there is worship most punctilious, and service most 
submissive, and devotion most abject. It is hardly 
necessary to name the god of this present world. 

" Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell from heaven/ 9 

Milton calls him. To him the homage of the multi- 
tude is given with no reserve. The worship of Mam- 

[5] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
mon is the one stupendous social fact of this gen- 
eration. We must not say that it is universal; that 
would be a grievous error. As in the days when 
idolatry cursed Israel there were thousands, un- 
known to the desponding prophet, who had not 
bowed the knee to Baal, so in these days there are 
hundreds of thousands who have not been de- 
bauched by the worship of Mammon, but it is the 
religion of the multitude. Men do believe in him ; 
their faith is sincere and unwavering; they are 
ready to prove it, every day, by their works. They 
have no doubt of his power, of his supremacy; all 
things are possible, they think, to those who secure 
his favour. That he holds in his hands the real good 
of life for man, and that there is no real happiness 
for any unless they propitiate him, is the first article 
in the creed of the great majority. It is not the rich 
or the prosperous alone who hold this creed; the 
poor and the degraded are equally ensnared by it ; 
their expectations of good are concentrated upon 
the same potentate. 

Never, since time began, has this worship been 
so widespread, so nearly universal as it is to-day. It 
is only within the last one or two centuries that 

[6] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

the way to the altars of Mammon has been cleared 
for the multitude. In slavery and in feudalism the 
opportunities of gain were confined to a very few; 
now that freedom is the heritage of all, this craving 
has become the common experience of mankind. 
Like every other natural passion it is a good servant 
but a tyrannical master. We are suffering now 
from its domination. 

To a very large extent the worship of Mammon 
has supplanted the worship of God. It is not a mere 
lip service, it is a living allegiance. It is by their 
works that the devotees prove their faith. We know 
that they believe in Mammon more than in God, 
for their lives give clear and abundant testimony. 
The evidences of this devotion are visible on every 
side. To what other cause can we attribute the 
evils that infest the government of our cities and 
that fill many of our state capitals with the stench 
of rotten politics; that turn many of our railway 
systems into gigantic instruments of extortion, and 
build up a mighty enginery of finance with power 
to exploit the savings of a nation for the enrich- 
ment of a few ? 

What is it that teaches men to be hard and cruel 

[7] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

in the pursuit of their advantages, and ruthlessly to 
crush all who stand in the way of the building of 
their fortunes ? What is it that dulls the sense of 
honour and the impulse of probity and makes men 
faithless to their trusts ? How shall we explain such 
a ghastly exhibit as that which is now in sight in 
the great New York insurance companies; such 
continental extortions as those which the govern- 
ment is now trying to unearth, and such eruptions 
of graft and boodle as every newspaper chronicles ? 
Are not all these convincing proofs of a prevailing 
faith in the supremacy of Mammon ? Many of the 
men who are engaged in such operations as these 
say with their lips that they believe in God, but 
it cannot be. Their actions prove that the real ob- 
ject of their faith and allegiance is Mammon. In 
their hearts they believe that Mammon is stronger 
and greater than God; that he is a better protector 
and friend than God ; that he can do more for them 
than God can do. When the claims of Mammon 
and of God conflict, their conduct makes it per- 
fectly clear in whom they put their trust. 

But these instances which I have mentioned are 
not exceptional. They are striking illustrations of 

[8] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

tendencies which we see at work on every side. 
They are symptoms of a constitutional malady. 
Love of money, faith in money, devotion to mate- 
rial things, has become the prevailing distemper of 
the time. It was doubtless true when the apostle 
said it, but it is probably ten times truer now than 
it was then, that the love of money is the root of 
every kind of evil. 

And it must be confessed that this habit of 
thinking has become quite too prevalent even in 
the churches and in the colleges and in the phil- 
anthropic world. How often have I heard men at 
the head of great Christian enterprises saying : 
"The one thing we need is more money!" Of 
course, if that statement had been challenged it 
would not have been defended; but the fact that it 
so often finds utterance, in one way or another, 
shows how overpowering is the emphasis which 
men have come to put upon the value of money, 
not only in the gratification of personal desires, 
but also in the promotion of philanthropic aims. 
All this is half -unconscious; it is in the air; we can 
hardly help thinking and saying what everybody 
else is thinking and saying. When the crowd all 

[9] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

about us is all the while falling prostrate before 
the throne of Mammon and acknowledging him to 
be supreme, it is hard for us to keep from going 
down with the rest. 

It seems to be a time, just now, for some pretty 
serious thinking on the part of Christian people, 
respecting this form of idolatry. None more debas- 
ing has yet appeared before men; its devastations 
threaten the life of the nation. 

It is producing social and political disintegra- 
tion. It is sowing dishonesty, suspicion, enmity. It 
is hurrying us on in the paths that lead to anarchy. 
For it must not be forgotten that Mammon can- 
not rule. Rule implies orderly governance, and 
what Mammon inevitably brings is disorder and 
strife and social chaos. A society in which the love 
of money is the ruling principle can have no end but 
destruction. Even now it may be seen that the 
throne of the usurper is unstable; it is tottering to 
its fall. We may worship this false god, but the 
worship can bring only degradation to ourselves 
and overthrow to the nation. 

The church in the olden days often found her- 
self crippled and corrupted by idolatry. The 

[10] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

prophets were always lifting up their voices against 
it. Is there no need to-day of such testimony ? Is 
not this the very sin and shame of the church to- 
day — the worship of Mammon ? Is it not true 
that the church, as well as the world, is putting a 
tremendously exaggerated estimate upon the value 
of money — whether as a means of personal en- 
joyment or as a means of service? And is it not 
true that this tremendously exaggerated estimate 
of the value of money must affect our characters 
and our conduct ? Does it not lead, inevitably, to a 
lessening of our scruples as to the means of getting 
it, and to a great undervaluation of the spiritual 
qualities and the moral convictions which must be 
sacrificed in obtaining it, in the coveted quanti- 
ties? 

I seem to have read somewhere, within the last 
few months, an intimation that the hope of the 
church was in the rich men who have heaped up 
enormous gains during the last generation; that 
the one thing needful was to enlist them in our 
Christian enterprises. I trust that there may be 
men of wealth among us who will find it in their 
hearts to help the church in its work, and whose 

[ii] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
help we may welcome. Much of this wealth, I 
trust, is consecrated ; we shall surely get our 
share of that, and we will take it and thank God 
for it. But it is a great error to turn the emphasis of 
our appeal toward the resources of multimillion- 
ism. " A little that a righteous man hath is better 
than the riches of many wicked. " It is better for 
us. It is worth more to us. If we believed in God we 
should know that this is true. And, even as a mat- 
ter of practical economy, the direction of the 
thought away from the many to the few is a capi- 
tal blunder. From what source have these great 
fortunes come? In most cases they have been 
gleaned, in the smallest sums, from millions of the 
poor. These rich men have learned how to gather 
in, from vast multitudes of the people, fractional 
contributions, for their enrichment. We do not 
want to levy any other tribute than the tribute of 
love ; but if we can get that sacred flame kindled in 
the hearts of the common people, our resources will 
be far more abundant and far more sure than if we 
trust in the large gifts of the few millionaires. 
Trust God, and the common people whom he 
loves. We shall find it safer, as a financial propo- 

[12] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

sition, than putting our trust in princes or in 
plutocrats. 

There is nothing that the church needs to-day 
so much as faith in God. Its weakness is not due to 
its uncertain hold on some of the minor theological 
beliefs; it goes a great deal deeper. The doubt 
which paralyses it is the deadly uncertainty about 
God. We are hearing much of the need of a new 
evangelism, and the need is great; but the note of 
this evangelism which must be sounded first and 
clearest is the glorious truth that God reigns, that 
his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and that 
his dominion endureth for ever and ever. If the 
church could really yet hold of this truth and be- 
lieve it, and make men believe it; if Mammon 
could be cast down from his throne in the hearts of 
the Christian people, and God could be exalted 
thereupon; if men could really feel that the justice 
and truth and purity and integrity and love in 
which God is revealed are worth more than 
money; that the weapons which are not carnal are 
mightier far in our warfare than all the powers of 
this world — the feebleness and infirmity of the 
church would soon depart, and she would go forth 

[13] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

to her conquests fair as the moon, clear as the sun 
and terrible as an army with banners. In the face of 
such witnessing the power of Mammon would 
wane. Men would believe, as they believed in the 
olden time, that God and not Mammon is the 
rightful ruler of the nation, and righteousness and 
truth would be established in the earth. The 
boodler and the grafter would fly as the bats fly at 
the dawn; the continental grasper would find his 
tower of pride turned into a pillory, and he would 
climb down in confusion; confidence and good will 
would banish suspicion and fear from the hearts of 
men. 

The whole trouble with the world to-day is the 
lack of faith in God. The church itself has been so 
overawed by the pomp and power of Mammon 
that its faith in God has become dim and wavering. 
And there has never been a day since he uttered 
them when the words of the Master had deeper 
meaning than they have to-day: 

No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate 
the one and love the other ; or else he will hold to one 
and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and 
Mammon. 

[14] 



Tainted Money 



1 HE novelists have been dealing rather freely 
of late with the question respecting the kind of 
human beings which the present plutocratic 
regime is producing. What breed of men is 
coming out of our gigantic commercial oper- 
ations? What manner of society does it all 
produce ? What are the habits, sentiments, stand- 
ards of judgment, forms of social enjoyment, 
which prevail in these circles ? Mrs. Burton Harri- 
son has been trying to answer these questions for 
us; so has Mr. Marion Crawford, and Mr. Charles 
Dudley Warner, and so have others. One striking 
contribution to this discussion is Sir Walter Be- 
sant's story, "Beyond the Dreams of Avarice." 
It is the tale of an ill-gotten fortune and of its in- 
fluence upon the lives of all who sought to gain 
possession of it. The old miser, the last proprietor, 
under whose sordid and infamous manipulations 

[17] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

the estate had been twice or thrice doubled, and 
who had driven his own children from their home 
by his avarice, dies^ apparently intestate, in one of 
the first chapters, and leaves a property of enor- 
mous proportions — enormous for England, only 
moderate for America — some twelve million 
pounds. The property, unless an heir appears, es- 
cheats to the State; but there is an heir — a grand- 
son, a young physician and rising man of science 
— who knows himself to be the heir, though the 
knowledge is shared by no one except his young 
wife and his lawyer. His father, who had cut him- 
self loose from a family whose traditions were all 
accursed, and had changed his name and made for 
himself an honourable reputation, had charged him 
on his death-bed not to touch that tainted wealth; 
and when he learns that there is no will, and that 
the property is legally his, his first inclination is to 
heed his father's counsel and never reveal his iden- 
tity. For a considerable time he maintains this res- 
olution, supported therein by his wife, whose in- 
tuitions never waver. The whole history of the 
family becomes known to them; the steps by which 
the fortune has been amassed are shown them; 

[18] 



TAINTED MONEY 

and the record is one of appalling cruelty and per- 
fidy. Evidently a curse has fallen on all who have 
had anything to do with the money, from the 
founder of the house to the last representative. 
And yet the knowledge that he can, by saying the 
word, step in and take all this fabulous wealth and 
make himself rich beyond the dreams of avarice, 
soon casts its spell over the life of this young physi- 
cian. Everybody knows the infamy of all the pre- 
vious possessors of this plunder — his grandfather 
included; for after the miser's death the newspa- 
pers unearthed the family secrets and spread the 
whole sickening story before the gaze of the world. 
To take the fortune is to be the inheritor of that 
infamy. " But, after all," he began to argue, "how 
am I to blame for the acts of my ancestors ? And is 
it not true that this generation has ceased to be 
squeamish about the sources of wealth ? Should I, 
after all, lose much social caste on account of the 
crimes of my forebears ? Would not a man with so 
much money be likely to become an important 
personage in society, no matter how the money 
may have been gotten ? And then, the good that 
could be done with it! The great college of science 

[19] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

that it would build ! The immense enterprises that 
could be endowed for the enlightenment of man- 
kind ! " So the dream wrought upon him, and the 
effect was melancholy. All his interest in his pro- 
fession was lost; his nature grew hard and cynical; 
his moral sense was blunted; all his ideals were 
dethroned. 

Other claimants soon appeared — grandneph- 
ews and grandnieces, who, not knowing of the 
existence of the direct heir, began to gather like 
moths to a candle. To every one of them the at- 
tempt to secure this property brought harm and 
shame; the nearer they came to it the more sordid 
grew their natures and the more disturbed their 
thoughts; lives that had been peaceful and pros- 
perous felt the blight of this Mountain of Mam- 
mon as soon as they came within its shadow. And 
the story makes it easy to see why this must have 
been; it was no result of superstition; it was a clear 
case of cause and effect. 

It is not necessary to tell the story, but the psy- 
chological study is full of suggestion. One is able to 
see that money secured by extortion or by crime 
must carry a curse with it to all who, seeing the 

[20] 



TAINTED MONEY 
blood-stains upon it, covet it for themselves. The 
question of tainted money is a question that this 
generation must face. There are vast heaps of it on 
every side of us — accumulations that have been 
made by methods as heartless, as cynically iniqui- 
tous as any that were employed by Roman plun- 
derers or robber barons of the Dark Ages. In the 
cool brutality with which properties are wrecked, 
securities destroyed, and people by the hundreds 
robbed of their little all to build up the fortunes of 
the multi-millionaires, we have an appalling reve- 
lation of the kind of monster that a human being 
may become. Much of this wealth has been gained 
by the most daring violations of the laws of the 
land; by tampering with courts of justice; by the 
bribery of city councils or legislatures, and even of 
Congress itself; by practices which have intro- 
duced into the body politic a virulent and deadly 
poison that threatens the very life of the Nation. 
That many of the largest fortunes in this country 
have some such origin all intelligent men know. Is 
this clean money ? Can any man, can any institu- 
tion, knowing its origin, touch it without being 
defiled? 

[21] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

We often hear it said that the money of Dives is 
just as good as any other man's money; that if he 
will only make over some portion of his wealth to 
us we will find good uses for it and ask no ques- 
tions about where he got it. Is this a safe principle ? 
Suppose we know that the money was stolen, and 
from whom it was stolen ; should we be justified in 
accepting it ? Should we not be partakers of the 
crime ? If we are morally certain that it was ob- 
tained by some kind of robbery, legalized or other- 
wise, yet do not know from whom it was wrested, 
is our complicity any less real ? 

In truth, the gold and the silver that have been 
obtained by wrong are corroded with a rust which 
eats the flesh like fire. Every man who covets such 
gains passes under their curse. Money is not a 
mere material entity. Its character is symbolic and 
representative. It always stands for something. It 
is either the reward of productive labor, of honest 
commerce, or it is the sign of injustice and fraud. 
\To separate the money from the history of the 
processes by which it was won is not practicable. 
To wish for ill-gotten gains is to condone the 
wrongs by which they were obtained/] 

[22] 



TAINTED MONEY 

Even if this reasoning be thought fanciful, no 
man can eliminate the personal factor which al- 
ways enters into the problem. To accept the reward 
of iniquity is to place upon our lips the seal of 
silence respecting its perpetrators. Those who rec- 
ognize no responsibility for the maintenance of 
public virtue may wear such a muzzle without dis- 
comfort; but it would seem that public teachers, of 
all sorts, should be unwilling to put it on. 

Money that has been gained by nefarious 
methods is often brought to the door of the church, 
and those who bring it seldom fail of a warm wel- 
come. The liberal contribution can hardly be re- 
fused; will not such charity cover a multitude of 
sins ? If this malefactor has done evil in the past, 
ought we not to be glad that he now seems to be of 
a better mind ? And this money will go just as far 
in "supporting the Gospel" as any other man's 
money. Why should we hesitate about taking it ? 
Think of the good that may be done by turning 
this wealth — which men say has been gotten by 
iniquity — into channels of mercy! If the liberal 
donor happen to conceive a special fondness for 
the parson, and there are handsome gifts now and 

[23] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

then, and suggestions of European tours, all this 
reasoning gains in cogency. 

Of course, under such circumstances, the pulpit 
of this church is not likely to discuss the kind of 
iniquity by which this money was gained, nor any- 
thing near akin to it. It would be extremely un- 
grateful — it would, indeed, be dishonourable — 
for this pulpit to touch upon such matters. Having 
sought and welcomed these liberal donations, it is 
simply the dictate of ordinary decency to refrain 
from criticising the financial methods of the donor. 
People might charge that this plutocrat had stipu- 
lated that nothing should be said in the church 
about his practices, but that is a crude conception; 
of course he has said nothing about it; nothing has 
been said by anybody; nothing needs to be said. 
This minister has never promised that he will be 
silent on themes of this character; it is not neces- 
sary for him to make any promise; the situation 
speaks for itself; if he has the instincts of a gentle- 
man, he will not assail the man who has put him 
under such obligations. 

This pulpit, then, will have no message respect- 
ing wrongs of this particular kind. And, inasmuch 

[24] 



TAINTED MONEY 
as it would seem rather inconsistent to attack other 
closely related social wrongs and avoid these, this 
pulpit will probably abstain from all reference to 
public evils. It will confine itself to what is known 
as " the simple Gospel " — to a purely abstract 
religionism which has little or nothing to do with 
life in this world, but which confines itself to the 
preparation of men for the world to come. The 
kind of preaching which Isaiah and Jeremiah and 
Amos and Paul and James practised will not be 
heard from this pulpit. Its moral power will be par- 
alysed. Its influence upon the social life of the 
community will be practically nil. Or, if it stands 
for anything at all, its silent testimony will support 
the iniquities by which the foundations of the so- 
cial order are undermined. 

Such is the effect of tainted money upon the life 
of a church. When it is coveted and sought, when 
those who bring it to the altars of the church are 
courted and made welcome, consequences like 
these are simply inevitable. 

Similar results must needs appear in the life of a 
college built on such foundations or largely de- 
pendent on resources of this character. Not a little 

[25] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

of this tainted money has been turned into the 
channels of the higher education. It seems to have 
been assumed by many of those who have this 
work in charge that all money is pure and holy, 
and that just as much good can be done with the 
money of a robber as with the money of an honest 
merchant or manufacturer. It seems even to have 
been regarded as a meritorious achievement to 
pave the highways of learning with the price of 
blood. 

It is passing strange that the implications and 
consequences of such an alliance should be ig- 
nored or disregarded. Is it not plain that an insti- 
tution which accepts subsidies from notoriously 
iniquitous sources, by this act virtually resigns the 
privilege of bearing testimony against such in- 
iquities ? When we enter into partnership with 
corruptionists and extortionists in the business of 
education, we must, in common decency, refrain 
from turning round and abusing our partners. 
Whatever public teaching may be needed, respect- 
ing the evil conditions out of which this fortune 
has sprung, this college, at least, can offer none. 
It is foolish to say that the donor has imposed no 

[26] 



TAINTED MONEY 

restrictions upon the teaching; certainly not; there 
is not the least need of it. Some things can be taken 
for granted, among gentlemen. It would be utterly 
dishonourable for an institution thus founded, or 
largely befriended, to enter into a thorough inves- 
tigation of the methods by which its endowments 
were accumulated. The teaching might deal, in an 
abstract way, with social subjects; but it could not 
examine historically and scientifically certain 
burning questions of its own neighbourhood and 
generation. Its instructors will be constrained to 
say to themselves — perhaps to one another — 
u All this is valuable and necessary work, but this 
is not the institution where such work can be 
done." Think of a college — above all, a "Chris- 
tian " college — putting itself in such an attitude 
as this before the world! 

But this is not all. An institution thus allied 
must needs pay honour to those whose benefac- 
tions it is sharing. There will be a place, and a high 
place, at its feasts for the men to whom it owes so 
much. Glowing words of eulogy will not be want- 
ing. The young men of the institution who look 
and listen will thus be aided in forming their theo- 

[27] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

ries of life. The whole world will see who it is that 
these Christian scholars and leaders of the people 
delight to honour. So it is that public opinion is 
formed, and that men who are the pirates of indus- 
try and the spoilers of the state are advanced to the 
front rank in modern society. 

Is it true that one man's money is worth as much 
as another's to a church or a college? Is it not 
rather true that there is a great deal of money with 
which the hands that are seeking to do the will of 
God must never defile themselves ? For much of 
this money, under all sound ethical standards, 
must be considered as stolen money. And do our 
churches and colleges need to be told that the par- 
taker is as bad as the thief ? 

But it may be said that a great deal of the money 
in circulation comes from questionable sources. 
Fraud and falsehood and extortion, we are told, 
play a large part in the building of many fortunes. 
Much of the money that comes into our hands has 
been tainted by methods of which we are not 
aware. This may be true; but so long as we are not 
aware of the evil sources, we are not contaminated. 
It is impossible for us to investigate the business of 

[28] 



TAINTED MONEY 

all our neighbours; it is our duty to assume that 
they are honest until there is good evidence to the 
contrary. But when their transactions are flagrant 
and notorious, we may at least decline to enter into 
partnership with them in the business of religion 
or of education. There is enough of clean money in 
the country — money that has been gained in hon- 
est trade or productive industry — to furnish the 
churches and the colleges with all necessary 
resources. 

Really — must it be said ? — money is not the 
first requisite of a great church or a great college. 
Some things are more important. Is it not well for 
churches and colleges to ask themselves what these 
things are ? What shall it profit a church or a col- 
lege if it shall gain the whole world and lose its 
own life ? 



[29] 



Standard Oil and Foreign 
Missions 



IT seems important to those who feel that a mis- 
take has been made in soliciting and accepting a 
large gift from Mr. Rockefeller to the American 
Board that the grounds of their opposition should 
be more fully set forth than has been possible hith- 
erto. As the discussion has been going on some 
things have grown more clear. At first the accep- 
tance of the gift was approved by many on the 
ground that it was unsolicited. It was admitted 
that it would have been a mistake to ask for it, but 
the voluntary proffer could not be rejected. It 
now transpires that it was not a voluntary proffer, 
that it was diligently sought for the space of three 
years. Those who approved the erroneous state- 
ments first given out, may be ready now to 
reconsider. 

It is also needful to make it entirely clear that 
those who disapprove of this alliance are not act- 

[33] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

ing upon mere gossip or rumour, but that they rest 
their judgment on well-accredited evidence. To 
bring these facts succinctly before the people of 
our churches is one purpose of the present paper. 
Certain elementary moral principles appear to 
be repudiated in the explicit statement of the pru- 
dential committee: "Our responsibility begins 
with the receipt of a gift. " The contention is that, 
no matter what may be the character of the giver, 
his gifts should be welcomed with thanks. It can 
hardly be possible that the committee means to 
stand on this rule. At any rate, it is very import- 
ant that a clear statement be made respecting the 
principles which should govern the receipt of gifts 
from doubtful sources. Our benevolent societies 
cannot knowingly accept gifts which are the pro- 
ceeds of lawlessness, nor must they knowingly be 
the partners of those who are winning gains by 
methods which, though not yet punished by the 
law, are yet notoriously and indubitably extor- 
tionate and dishonourable. In the complexities of 
modern commerce it is often possible to take ad- 
vantage of the necessities of men or of their weak- 
ness, and extort from them their property without 

[34] 



STANDARD OIL AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 

incurring the penalty of any law. But property 
thus acquired is held by no better moral title than 
the booty of the highwayman, and the principle 
which forbids complicity in unjust gains applies 
to this no less rigorously. 

It may be agreed that gifts coming from sources 
unassailed may be accepted without questioning. 
It is not necessary that a missionary society should 
undertake the duties of a moral inquisitor; it 
ought to assume, unless there is evidence to the 
contrary, that gifts laid on its altars have been 
honestly acquired. But when the question is raised, 
and there is reasonable ground for believing that 
the money has been iniquitously obtained and 
does not rightfully belong to the one who offers it, 
the society must refuse to receive it until the doubt 
is resolved. There is a moral obligation here which 
cannot be shirked. It may sometimes be a difficult 
and disagreeable duty; that is no reason why it 
should not be faithfully performed. 

The prudential committee lays down this 
maxim: "Our responsibility begins with the re- 
ceipt of a gift. " By this it means, as its argument 
shows, that its responsibility begins after the gift 

[35] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

has been received. Let us amend by saying, M The 
responsibility of a missionary society begins in the 
act of receiving a gift, if that gift is unsolicited. " 
And surely it will not be maintained that a mission- 
ary society has no responsibility for the character 
of a gift which it has spent three years in solicit- 
ing. 

With matters of fact the prudential committee 
and its defenders deal no more satisfactorily than 
with matters of principle. Referring to the reasons 
given by the protestants why this gift should be re- 
fused, the committee says that if it does not feel 
warranted in passing judgment upon "questions 
which have never been settled, either before the 
courts or at the bar of public opinion. " This must 
mean that neither the courts nor public opinion 
have furnished any adequate reasons for believing 
that the fortune out of which this donation comes 
has been flagitiously acquired. It is true that cer- 
tain accusations against this company are now 
being investigated by the officers of the United 
States Government, and that legal or legislative 
proceedings of one sort or another against the 
company are now pending in thirteen or fourteen 

[36] 



STANDARD OIL AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 
states, and it is true that these questions have not 
been settled. 

But it is not true that no charges against this 
company have been proved in court. More than 
once the courts of the United States and the states 
have rendered judgment against it, setting the seal 
of their condemnation upon its offences. The facts 
concerning these court proceedings have been 
spread before the people in newspaper reports; 
they have been discussed in magazines and in pub- 
lic addresses; the common people, as a rule, are 
well informed concerning them. Much of the popu- 
lar knowledge of the operations of this company 
comes from two sources: Mr. Henry D. Lloyd's 
"Wealth vs. Commonwealth, " and Miss Ida M. 
Tarbell's " History of the Standard Oil Company," 
and those who argue that nothing has been proved 
against the Standard Oil Company are wont to 
disparage these books as reckless in their method 
or partisan in their temper. 

Most of those who thus judge them have never 
read them. Those who have read them know that 
all their important statements are based on official 
documents, on testimony presented before leg- 

[37] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

islative and congressional committees, on copies 
of contracts and other business instruments, and 
on the records of courts. In all these cases the au- 
thorities are cited. Every man who can read the 
English language can verify them. About one-third 
of each of Miss Tarbell's solid volumes is made up 
of such documentary evidence. To represent 
either of these books as the careless or slanderous 
assaults of ignorant persons is less than just. 
Neither of these writers is capable of such in- 
justice. Each of them wrote with a deep sense of 
social responsibility. 

Mr. Lloyd's volume exhibits more feeling; it is 
the testimony of a knightly soul aflame against op- 
pression. But none who knew this man, who spent 
his life in the service of humanity and laid it down 
as a sacrifice in a great battle against wrong, needs 
to be told that in all his passionate devotion to the 
highest ideals, he could never have wantonly slan- 
dered any man. Miss Tarbell's style is more re- 
strained. From beginning to end her book gives 
the impression of being a dispassionate exposition. 
The evidence is fairly weighed ; the investigation is 
judicial. 

[38] 



STANDARD OIL AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 
The conclusive proof that these revelations are 
true is found in the fact that no action has been 
brought against either of these writers. The state- 
ments made by both of them respecting the meth- 
ods and operations of this company are damning. 
It is incredible that these men would have rested 
under such charges if the charges could have been 
disproved. Mr. Lloyd was not an irresponsible per- 
son; he was a man of wealth and position. Miss 
Tarbell spread her indictment before the public in 
the pages of a great magazine, whose publishers 
could have been severely punished if what she 
stated was libellous. There was money enough to 
prosecute slanderers, and shrewd lawyers enough 
to have exposed their malice, and courts not at all 
loath to do them justice. The fact that not a finger 
has been raised to punish them is evidence that 
their indictment cannot be overthrown. 

Not only from these books, and from the au- 
thorities to which they refer, but from a great va- 
riety of other sources open to the people of the 
United States, may be drawn abundant materials 
for a judgment respecting the Standard Oil Com- 
pany and its methods. It is thus a matter of com- 

[39] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

mon knowledge that the Standard Oil Company 
has been frequently convicted, sometimes out of 
its own mouth, of transgressions of the laws of the 
land. A fearless judge of the United States District 
Court denounced their system of rebates as "gross, 
illegal and inexcusable, " and said of it: "The dis- 
crimination complained of in this case is so wanton 
and oppressive that it could hardly have been ac- 
cepted by an honest man having a due regard for 
the rights of others. " The plea of the apologists 
for the company always is that their system of re- 
bates was not illegal until the interstate commerce 
law had forbidden it. But Judge Baxter brushes 
that sophistry aside^He declares that the charter of 
every railway involves " the obligation to carry for 
every person offering business under like circum- 
stances at the same rate. All unjust discriminations 
are in violation of sound public policy and are for- 
bidden by law Ol . . If it were not so, the managers 
of railways in collusion with others in command of 
large capital could control the business of the coun- 
try, at least to the extent that the business was de- 
pendent on railroad transportation for its success, 
and make and unmake the fortunes of men at will. " 

[40] 



STANDARD OIL AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 

This is precisely what the Standard Oil Com- 
pany is charged with doing through all its history, 
and the solemn declaration of a judge of the 
United States Court that it is "greatly abhorrent 
to all fair minds" finds an echo in every honest 
heart. It was but a small amount that the com- 
pany was compelled by this decision to disgorge, 
but the words of Judge Baxter apply with equal 
force to the great bulk of the transactions of this 
company with the railroads for a period of ten or 
twelve years, and he describes a kind of operation 
under which they extorted from their competitors, 
through the railroads, many millions of dollars. It 
was by help of this "wanton and oppressive" 
exercise of power that this stupendous monopoly 
was built up. The Standard Oil Company, with its 
present power to rule and ruin the business of the 
country, could not have existed but for this illegal 
and outrageous use of the railroads in the exter- 
mination of competitors. There was never any ap- 
peal from Judge Baxter's judgment in this case, 
and if anything can be u settled by the courts " it 
was settled then that it was by the help of flagi- 
tious methods that this fortune has been reared. 

[41] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
However persistently, in accepting gifts, we may 
shut our eyes to these facts, millions of the Ameri- 
can people are fully informed concerning them. 

There are other facts not less notorious. It is 
known that the managers of this combination, 
after doing business illegally as a trust for ten 
years, were compelled by a decree of the Supreme 
Court of Ohio to dissolve their organization and 
go out of business. Their entire procedure during 
all that time had been in violation of law. They 
found in New Jersey, of course, a "legal" outfit 
for carrying on their depredations. 

On various occasions they have been constrain- 
ed to make distinct confession respecting the na- 
ture of their business. In 1879 when their leaders 
were under indictment for conspiracy, they refused 
to answer questions put to them by an investigat- 
ing committee on the plea that if they told the 
truth they would incriminate themselves; and 
again, in 1898, when ordered by the Supreme Court 
of Ohio to produce their books in court, the secre- 
tary of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio made 
oath that he could not do so without incriminating 
both the company and himself. 

[42] 



STANDARD OIL AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 
The American people know of all these things 
and many more like unto them. More than this, 
they are fully aware that the business methods of 
the company, even when not technically illegal, 
are often utterly dishonourable. Competitive busi- 
ness at its best estate is apt to be hard and merci- 
less, but it recognizes certain principles of decency 
and fair play. It is a game, and it is played to win; 
but the rules of the game are fairly observed by 
honourable competitors. It is the simple truth to 
say that the Standard Oil Company from the 
beginning has violated all these rules. It has play- 
ed continually with stacked cards and loaded dice. 
On the football field or in the prize ring such un- 
sportsmanlike behaviour would be execrated. 

There is a kind of competition which the Ger- 
man law makes criminal. This is the kind of com- 
petition which this company has always practised. 
The system of rebates is, of course, the most ab- 
horrent of these practices. It is often said that the 
acceptance of rebates has been nearly universal 
on the part of large shippers, but the kind of re- 
bates extorted by this company — rebates not 
only on its own shipments, but on all those of its 

[43] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

competitors, ordinary concerns could never have 
collected. Other gigantic combinations are now 
enforcing the same kind of tribute from inde- 
pendent dealers, but it is palpable that only those 
aggregations of wealth which are able to dominate 
the railroads could compel them to collect tribute 
for their benefit from their competitors. There is 
nothing more startling or more ominous in Ameri- 
can history than the fact that such a tremendous 
injustice has been permitted to go on year after 
year, with no interference by the Government. Of 
this kind of extortion Mr. Rockefeller has the 
credit of being the inventor. It was a weapon that 
he forged and wielded most mercilessly in the de- 
struction of his competitors. Others have since 
learned the art, but the credit of originating it 
must be given to him. Is it not entirely clear that 
no man, with the most elementary notions of jus- 
tice, could ever have conceived of it ? 

Besides this colossal wrong many practices of 
the utmost baseness have characterized this busi- 
ness. The subsidizing of local railway freight 
agents, by whom full reports have been sent to the 
Standard of all shipments arriving at the station 

[44] 



STANDARD OIL AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 

from competing companies; the bribery of the em- 
ployees of competitors to reveal to the Standard 
the secrets of their employers' business; especially 
the contemptible manner in which prices are al- 
ways cut to kill competition, and then raised as 
soon as it is killed, and every poor oil pedlar any- 
where in the land selling other than Standard oil is 
dogged and driven from his livelihood by this giant 
— these are illustrations of a kind of thing which 
does not deserve to bear the name of business. In 
Miss Tarbell's chapter on " Cutting to Kill " will 
be found photographic reproductions of the kind 
of " reports " made to this company and many let- 
ters from dealers all over the land reciting their 
experience. 

Let no man say that such methods as these are 
characteristic of American commerce. What do the 
reputable business men mean who come forward 
to defend or to apologize for this brigandage ? Do 
they wish to associate themselves with an enormity of 
this nature ? Do they want us to believe that they 
are doing business after this fashion ? Is it Pharisa- 
ism to claim a higher standard of business moral- 
ity than that which rules in such transactions ? 

[45] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

Such are a few of the notorious facts upon which 
the American people have made up their judg- 
ment respecting the business of the Standard Oil 
Company. If iniquitous gains are not to be wel- 
comed into the Lord's treasury, a serious mistake 
must have been made in soliciting these. 

It is sometimes said that this man and this com- 
pany are only the products of bad social conditions. 
But history shows that they are producers more 
than products. They have done more to create 
these evil social conditions than any score of other 
agencies. 

We are often asked why we single out this man 
for reprobation. If the answer has not already 
been given it is enough to say that we did not 
single him out; it was the prudential committee 
who singled him out by soliciting his donation. 
We object to this gift because it is now before us 
for judgment. It is said that there are others from 
whom a gift would be equally objectionable. Even 
if that were true, no gifts have been offered by these 
others, and it will be time to decide about them 
when they are offered. Each case must stand on its 
own merits. 

[46] 



STANDARD OIL AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 
That there may be others with whom the 
churches ought to refuse alliance is probable. The 
methods which the Standard Oil Company has 
found so successful are being adopted by other 
great companies, and this is the alarming fact. 

This vast power of concentrated wealth, which 
is exerted, with a growing disregard of human wel- 
fare for the aggrandizement of the few by the op- 
pression of the many, has filled the minds of the 
people with a mighty indignation. It is not true 
that all rich men are robbers, but the facts which 
have come to light within the last year respecting 
some of the aggregations of wealth are sufficiently 
disquieting. The Standard Oil Company is not 
the only gigantic monopoly which evinces an un- 
social purpose, and there is no intention on the 
part of those who resist these aggressions to con- 
fine their warfare to this one organization. But 
this is the mightiest and probably the worst of 
these anti-social forces; its operations are better 
known than those of any of its kindred; the case 
against it is clearer than against any other monop- 
oly. If the churches of Christ are to separate them- 
selves from the iniquity of conscienceless and 

[47] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

predatory wealth, there can be no better place than 
this to begin. If we accept in our Christian work 
the alliance of the Standard Oil Company, we can 
refuse no other alliance with oppressors and de- 
spoilers of the people; to say that we will not testify 
against this iniquity because others are nearly or 
quite as heinous is practically to say that we will 
testify against no iniquity, that in the presence of 
all this wrong we will shut our eyes and seal our 
lips. 

Is it not plain that the association into which the 
Church is being drawn in its solicitation of this 
gift must be full of injury to the cause which it rep- 
resents and embarrassing and humiliating to the 
people upon whom it depends for support ? Surely, 
there are those with whom we cannot be profitably 
yoked together, and we beseech our churches, be- 
fore it is too late, to consider well the harm which 
this alliance is sure to work in several directions. 

The Church which accepts the Standard Oil 
Company as its yoke-fellow can hardly hope to 
keep the respect of right-minded young men and 
women. Tens of thousands of these have been 
studying social problems in our colleges and uni- 

[48] 



STANDARD OIL AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 
versities, and their minds are clear upon the bear- 
ing of these social questions. The Church which, 
for money, is ready to condone social injustice will 
lose its hold on these young people. They are able 
to understand the law of Christ, and they have 
studied the record of this iniquity, and they know 
that there can be no agreement between them. 
They will either be repelled from the Church, as 
too many of them have already been, or else, 
drawn by the example of those who ought to be 
better guides into complaisance with what they 
know to be wrong, their moral standards will be 
lowered and their characters undermined. Let no 
man dismiss this as a chimera; the Church is in 
great danger of inflicting terrible injury upon the 
youth of this generation, and thus of striking a 
fatal blow at her own life. 

The effect upon the working people of the land 
and upon the whole of the non-churchgoing class 
must also be well considered. There are many ex- 
planations, some of which are more or less plausi- 
ble, of the increasing absence of the industrious 
self-respecting working people from our churches, 
but the one great cause is the almost universal be- 

[49] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

lief that the churches of the country are in too close 
relations with unscrupulous and predaceous 
wealth. A good many of us have been trying hard to 
correct this impression and to remove the causes 
of it. We have felt that the separation between the 
churches and these honest, hard-working people, 
who are the bone and sinew of our population, is 
the opprobrium of our Christianity. We had hoped 
that our Congregational Churches were making 
some progress toward a better understanding with 
them, but the effect of the acceptance of this gift 
will be to widen and deepen the chasm between the 
churches and those whom they most need to reach. 
It is fatuous to doubt it. From all over the land, 
already, the testimony is pouring in, showing that 
this is sure to happen. By the working people, the 
average people, everywhere, the protest against 
the acceptance of the gift was met with a glad out- 
cry of hope and thanksgiving; while the tidings 
that it has been overruled has called forth bitter 
words of despairing indignation. 

If the Church wishes to regain its hold upon the 
people who heard its Master gladly, it must keep 
itself free from such alliances as these. 

[50] 



STANDARD OIL AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 

The truth is that the great masses of the Ameri- 
can people have a very clear and positive opinion 
respecting the sources from which this gift has 
come. No casuistry will change their minds. They 
never can be persuaded that friendship with such 
malign powers is not suspicious and shameful. 
They will insist on believing that churches as well 
as men are known by the company they keep, and 
they will never be convinced that a church which 
cultivates the society and co-operation of suchfmen 
is a true representative of Jesus Christ. 

Finally, the national aspects of this question 
press upon our attention. This nation is facing a 
crisis in its history. Our easy-going optimism may 
ignore it, but the battle is on between corporate 
greed and industrial freedom. Enormous aggrega- 
tions of capital are seeking to gather up and control 
not only the railways and the mines and the food 
supply of the people, but the Government itself. 
This power already lays a heavy hand on industry 
and enterprise. Thoughtful men confront the future 
with sober faces. If we want to save our nation 
from the vast oppressions that are sure to provoke 
reactions, we must gird ourselves for a determined 

[51] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

struggle. In all this warfare the Christian churches 
ought to be at the front, leaders in the fight for 
equal opportunity, witnesses for the liberty with 
which the Son makes us free. 

Now, it is undeniable that among the powers 
and influences which have led the nation into the 
peril which now threatens us — the peril arising 
from aggregations of selfish wealth — none has 
been more potent or more ruthless than that which 
it is now proposed to take into partnership in our 
missionary work. It is an impossible suggestion. 
As Christian patriots we cannot think of it. We 
must keep our churches from all entangling al- 
liances with the enemies of our country, no matter 
in what guise they may appear. Failure here will be 
the costliest blunder that the Church has ever 
made. 



[52] 



Shall Ill-Gotten Gains Be Sought 
For Christian Purposes?* 



See footnote on page 55. 



* Address before the American Board of Commissioners 
for Foreign Missions, at Seattle, Washington, September 15, 
1905. 

The following "Statement of Principles" was issued by the 
Prudential Committee of the Board, as the platform on which 
the Board proposed to stand: 

" (1) Organized as a corporation to carry on foreign mission- 
ary work and to receive gifts for that purpose, the American 
Board has not been given the authority to discriminate between 
those who offer such gifts, and thereby to judge the character or 
reputation of the donors. It is not a beneficiary from the gift, 
but only an agent or a trustee for others. 

" (2) While the Board cannot properly accept money from 
one to whom any of its officers knows it does not belong, it can- 
not, on the other hand, properly decline to receive money from 
its legal owner, provided it is given for the purposes for which 
the Board was established and in accordance with its rules. In 
the absence of legal proof to the contrary, it is necessary to 
assume that money belongs to the person making the gift. 
Investigation by the Executive Officers to determine the 
sources from which gifts come is neither justifiable nor prac- 
ticable. 

" (3) By acting under the above principles, which require 
the receiving of gifts without compelling its officers to trace the 
manner in which the donor may have acquired them, the Board 
pronounces no judgment on the character of donors. Nor by the 
acceptance of gifts are its officers or members stopped from 
criticising business methods, or from persistently raising their 
voices in behalf of the application of the principles of righteous- 
ness in all departments and walks of life. 

" (4) The officers of this Board, as of all other similar Boards 
organized to promote religion, philanthropy, and education, are 
morally bound to use every legitimate means to secure and con- 
vert money from other uses into the direct service of advancing 
the kingdom of God in the world. It is for the good of all that 
the way should be made easier, and not more difficult, for all to 
give of their present possessions and increasing wealth for the 
noblest purposes." 

Dr. Gladden's resolution which was before the Board at the 
same time was as follows: "Resolved that the officers of this 

[55] 



Board should neither invite nor solicit donations to its funds 
from persons whose gains have been made by methods morally 
reprehensible or socially injurious." 

The discussion was ended by laying the "Principles" and 
the resolution on the table together. 



[56] 



I desire to express my dissent from the "prin- 
ciples " set forth by the Prudential Committee for 
the government of the Board in the gathering of 
its revenues. 

'Why introduce into this assembly disturbing 
and divisive questions ? " I am asked. The answer 
is first, that those who think as I do are not respon- 
sible for the introduction of these questions; the 
officers of the Board themselves have introduced 
them. The question must mean, then, "Why not 
agree to this statement of principles without de- 
bate, and avoid all unpleasant discussion?" It 
seems to be assumed that any dissent from this 
statement can only arise from a litigious and quar- 
relsome temper, or an undue wilfulness or vanity, 
or some other phase of depravity. 

I wonder, dearly beloved brethren, if we are ask- 
ing too much when we ask to be judged a little less 

[57] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

harshly than this. The men who are protesting here 
to-day against the policy of the Prudential Com- 
mittee are not seeking notoriety : they have no par- 
ticular occasion to do anything of the sort. They 
are not dissenting because they like to be contrary ; 
they are not unmindful of the injury which such a 
discussion may inflict upon the work of the Board. 
Perhaps they feel this injury as keenly as others. 
Such men as William J. Tucker, and William H. 
Ryder, and John Bascom, and Reuen Thomas, 
and Philip Moxom, and William V. W. Davis, and 
Daniel Evans, and Hugh M. Scott, and E. D. Cur- 
tis, and E. G. Updike, and Charles M. Sheldon, 
and Charles R. Brown, and Sydney Strong, and 
Artemus Haynes, and Lewis O. Brastow, and 
Newell Dwight Hillis, and Frank S. Fitch — I 
name but a few out of many — have earned the 
right to be regarded by you not as pestilent ego- 
tists and disturbers of the peace of the churches, 
but as loyal Congregationalists. They have a right 
to be fully credited when they say that they dissent 
from the statement of principles here presented 
because it is their profound conviction that the 
policy declared and implied in that statement and 

[58] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 
illustrated in recent acts of the Committee must, if 
persisted in, work deep and deadly injury to this 
Board, to the Congregational churches, and to all 
the interests of the Kingdom of Heaven. 

They do not think, and they have never said 
anything which implies, that the members of this 
Committee or the officers of this Board intend any 
such injury. They know that the interests and pur- 
poses of these men are just as honest as their own. 
It is the tendencies and consequences of their 
policy that we are discussing; not their intentions. 
Men with the best intentions may do a great deal 
of harm; and it is not an unfriendly act to point out 
to them consequences which they do not see and 
from which they would surely shrink. 

I come now to the " Principles " formulated for 
the guidance of the Board, with what they involve 
and imply. 

Principle One is defective in its statement of the 
purpose for which the Board was organized. It is 
much more than " a corporation to carry on mis- 
sionary work and to receive gifts for that purpose.'' 
In the words of President Tucker : " The Board is 
not primarily a depository for the reception of un- 

[59] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

solicited gifts, nor even an agent or trustee for their 
disbursement. Primarily the Board, as it exists to- 
day, is a powerful organization for the solicitation 
and direction of funds toward missionary ends. 
Its work in these regards is as positive and aggres- 
sive as its work in the field. Principles one and two 
virtually ignore the whole matter of solicitation in 
which present issues for the most part lie." It is 
this function which we must keep clearly before us 
in the entire discussion. It is what has been done in 
the exercise of this function, and nothing else, that 
has provoked all this controversy. Yet the entire 
argument of the Prudential Committee, as it has 
been presented to the public, has ignored this fun- 
damental issue. I think that a great deal of moral 
confusion has been caused by this evasion; and I 
hope that we shall be able here to get the main 
question clearly before us. 

I would not, however, evade the question to 
which the committee has sought to confine our 
thoughts. If the Board were simply, in its Home 
Work, a depository for the reception of gifts, the 
ethical principles which should govern its action 
are not clearly stated by the committee. 

[60] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 

It may be granted that gifts which come from 
unknown sources, uninvited gifts, like those which 
are dropped upon the contribution plate, may be 
taken without questioning. To learn the source of 
all such gifts would be impossible, and we are not 
advocating absurdities. Offerings that are made 
without ostentation, before which no trumpets are 
blown, which expect no recognition, may be freely 
received, and no possible harm can be done. 

But when the giver comes with his gift and asks 
us to accept it publicly and formally at his hands, 
the question is very different. " A gift " — I am 
quoting from a manuscript in my possession — 
"a gift requiring an act of acceptance differs in 
several ways from one that obeys the Biblical in- 
junction of not letting the left hand know what the 
right hand does, in that its effect upon the com- 
munity at large is to be considered. If the commun- 
ity suffers in its ideals of honesty from such an ac- 
ceptance, there is a very serious issue raised. Gifts 
requiring an act of acceptance, and those which do 
not, belong to different categories; and there is no 
use in confusing the issue by talking of them as if 
they differed only as to size. The offering which 

[61] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

comes unostentatiously, through the regular chan- 
nels, can have no unworthy motive attached to it : 
the public gift may be prompted by many consid- 
erations, some good, some bad and others merely 
indifferent." 

This distinction, by the way, entirely disposes of 
the contention that we are seeking to prevent un- 
worthy men from doing good with their money. 
Any rich man who is willing to make his gifts im- 
personal and secret will find no difficulty whatever 
in bestowing them. 

It is only gifts which require some public recog- 
nition of the giver, and which connect themselves 
with the giver, about which any question can be 
raised. Every such gift represents the giver. His 
character is more or less reflected in it. Property, 
as Hegel has so truly said, is an extension of the 
personality, and the personality can never be elim- 
inated when gifts are publicly made. 

It is often said that one man's dollar is as good as 
another man's dollar, but that is far from true. 
One dollar lying in a pile of dollars may be as good 
as any other dollar in that pile; but one man's dol- 
lar is not as good as another man's dollar, because 

[62] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 

the man is the coefficient of the dollar. What did 
Jesus say about the poor widow's mite ? He said 
that it was more than all the gifts dropped into the 
treasury by the rich men. It was worth more to the 
Kingdom of God. Would you have replied to Him 
that one mite is just as good as another mite, and 
that since some of those rich men had cast in a 
thousand mites, their offerings must be worth a 
thousand times as much as hers ? Would you have 
argued in that way with Him ? If you believe that 
there is any truth in what He says then one man's 
dollar is not as good as another man's. It is not 
only the man behind the gun who makes the differ- 
ence : it is the man behind the dollar quite as truly. 
And the church which loses sight of this distinc- 
tion, or suffers it to be blurred, is on the way to 
apostasy. 

I believe that I am responsible for the phrase 
"tainted money," and I wish to defend it as the 
expression of a most important truth. It has been 
greatly ridiculed; some of those who agree with me 
have deprecated the use of it, but I think it con- 
veys a meaning which we must not miss. 

If money cannot be tainted, then it cannot be 

[63] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

sanctified. I hope we are not yet ready to say that 
there can be no such thing as consecrated money. I 
trust that that phrase may yet have a real and an 
inspiring meaning. 

Other material things may become morally 
tainted. No woman listening to me would wish to 
accept, as a gift, and wear with the knowledge of 
her friends, a fur collar or a diamond brooch of 
Mrs. Cassie Chadwick's. Why not ? It may be just 
as fine a fur or just as genuine a brooch as any she 
could buy. 

But you say that a personal possession like that 
is different from a gift of money. Yes ; the personal 
connection is more clearly brought to light, but it 
exists, even in the case of money. 

Here is a Congregational church on the prairies 
of Kansas, which has become deeply and enthusi- 
astically enlisted in the work of foreign missions. 
It has established classes and circles for mission 
study ; it has organized methods of collecting funds 
among its men, its women and its children; it keeps 
in closest touch with all the work on the mission 
field; the spirit of prayer for missions permeates all 
its assemblies. Finally it adopts a mission school, 

[64] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 

somewhere in Turkey, and by the most heroic and 
self-denying efforts it sends a gift of five hundred 
dollars for the support of that school. 

The teachers and missionaries all know whence 
the money came; what inspired it and what goes 
with it. I care not whether the identical dollars and 
dimes and nickels contributed by the church are 
sent, or whether the money goes in a draft through 
a Turkish bank; the source of the gift is known. 

Now let us suppose that, one year later, some 
gambler or keeper of a house of prostitution, 
moved by motives which we will not explore, sends 
with some publicity, to the same mission band the 
same amount of money; and the missionaries 
know the source of it. 

Is there no difference, to the missionaries, in 
these two gifts ? Shall we say that since one man's 
dollar is as good as another man's, the five hun- 
dred dollars from the gambler's till will do just as 
much good on the mission field as the five hundred 
dollars of the praying, loving, consecrated church ? 
I think we all know better. 

The one gift comes bringing love and hope and 
courage with it; every dollar the missionaries use 

[65] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
reminds them of the true and tender hearts that 
are working with them and praying for them ; their 
faith is deepened and their purpose strengthened 
whenever they think of it. 

The other gift brings with it the most painful 
and depressing thoughts; they may be glad that 
they have the money to use, but they cannot help 
remembering how dreadful are the sources from 
which it has come; how many lies and perfidies 
and cruelties have gone into the gathering of it; 
how many souls have been ensnared and defiled in 
heaping it up. 

One man's dollar is as good as another man's 
dollar ? No such thing as consecrated money ? No 
such thing as tainted money ? Nobody says so who 
is not destitute of moral imagination. 

" Money is a symbol " — I am quoting again, at 
length, from the manuscript of which I spoke — 
"an outward and visible sign, and if the thing 
which it symbolizes is worthy, then the gift of it is 
worthy ; if the thing it symbolizes is a thing of dark- 
ness and crooked ways, the offer of it is an insult 
and the reception of it is an immorality. If $100,- 
000 is offered a church the first question to be de- 

[66] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 

cided is this : Of what is this money the pledge and 
token ? If it is the sign of hard work, if it tells a 
story of great energy and much patience, of pluck 
and endurance, if it means that the possessor of it 
has refused to be daunted, and has fought a good 
fight and that his muscles have endured the strain 
and his heart has not fainted, then it is a very 
worthy offering, and the man places in our hands a 
holy and a sacred thing, the very sacrament of his 
manhood. The offering of it is a credit to him, and 
the acceptance of it by the church is to be com- 
mended. 

" If, on the other hand, the money is the outward 
and visible token of a dishonest career, if the thing 
it symbolizes is anything that decent men would 
not touch, if it betokens a life disgraced by re- 
morseless violence and plunder, if it has been 
wrung from the helpless, and snatched from the 
unsuspecting, if it is the shameless representation 
of a combination that crushes out smaller and less 
powerful combinations, a pirate upon the sea of 
industrial life, then the offer of that money is a 
covert sneer, and the acceptance of it stains the 
hands held out for it. Is there not something ethi- 

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THE NEW IDOLATRY 

cally wrong and spiritually degrading about accept- 
ing for our holy work money that has been made in 
the devil's way ? Is there not a certain blasphemy 
in thinking that God's work will suffer unless we 
use such instruments for its advancement as are 
provided by the enemies of His Kingdom ? 

"Suppose such a gift could suddenly assume 
visible shape of that of which it is the representa- 
tive, and by some kind of chemico-vital process 
become the thing it is the symbol of, and right 
there before the eyes of the recipient he could see, 
in panorama, the lies and the heartlessness, the 
competitive knife dripping with the blood of inno- 
cent victims, the despair of the man who has been 
crushed to the wall, and robbed of his living, the 
midnight scheming of the rogue, the thefts com- 
mitted under the shadow by laws passed to prevent 
them — suppose he could see all these foul shapes 
before him, a sight more hideous than any in the 
inferno, think you he would dare accept that for 
God's work? Would he not with unutterable 
loathing cry out, "Take away that foul thing! 
God's work is dependent on no such ministering 
agents ! " 

[68] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 

Is not that spectre visible, even now, in every 
part of this continent ? I think that it is. It may be 
that there are some who are too blind to see it and 
some who even count it a ministering angel; but 
there are millions who behold it in its true light, 
and whose minds are filled with amazement, yea 
and scorn, when they behold the figure of the 
Bride of Christ drawing near to that horror, and 
supplicating its aid. Would to God that spectacle 
could be blotted from the sight of men; but it is 
there, and no veil of sophistry that we can weave 
will ever avail to hide it ! 

I hope I have made plain the truth that money 
may be and often is a symbol; that it may repre- 
sent, most vividly, virtuous or vicious character 
and conduct; and that when it stands for things 
that are evil and base and cruel, the church must 
not welcome even voluntary gifts of it. The church 
cannot do so without compromising herself. The 
fact that the donor has a legal title to it does not 
alter the case. To hide behind a bare legality in 
such a transaction is shameful. 

I have dwelt upon this phase of the question, not 
because it is the real question before us, but be- 

[69] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

cause it is the phase of the question which has 
been continually thrust before us from the begin- 
ning of this discussion, and because the ethical 
principles involved greatly need clearing up. The 
principles which I have laid down have been rec- 
ognized in all the ages of the church. It has always 
been understood that the children of God must not 
be partakers of the rewards of iniquity. From the 
old day when the children of Israel were forbidden 
to bring the hire of a harlot into the congregation 
of the Lord, and when the Psalmist represented 
Jehovah as crying out, " I hate robbery for burnt 
offering," down through the days of the early 
fathers and even in the mediaeval church, there 
has been a constant testimony against all partner- 
ship or complicity with evil-doers in carrying on 
the Lord's work, The quality and the curse of 
tainted money have been well enough known to 
the saints of all the ages. Even when mediaeval 
bandits were acquiring merit by gifts to monas- 
teries, the voice of the church was clear in con- 
demnation. It is to be lamented that these first 
years of the twentieth century have witnessed the 
attempt to erase this distinction; to repudiate the 

[70] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 

symbolical character of money, and to obscure the 
ethical judgment respecting the use of it which 
moral teachers have always recognized. It is an 
unfortunate enterprise and it will not prosper, for 
God is in His world, even though portions of the 
church are unaware of it, and the ethical judg- 
ments of men are sure to be lifted up and purified. 
The reception of voluntary gifts is not, however, 
the question before us. No gifts from compromis- 
ing sources have been proffered to this Board or 
are likely to be. The practical issue before us con- 
cerns the active solicitation rather than the pas- 
sive acceptance of gifts. Even granting that "the 
American Board has not been given the authority 
to discriminate between those who offer gifts," it is 
certain that the Board has ample authority to dis- 
criminate among those from whom it will solicit 
gifts. It does discriminate among these persons. It 
has not gone, and it will not go to great gamblers 
or liquor sellers soliciting aid. The suggestion that 
it might intend to do so has been already indig- 
nantly repelled as a slander. The legal title of such 
persons to the property now in their hands may be 
perfect, but the officers of the American Board will 

[71] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

not seek out such persons and invite their co-oper- 
ation in its work. It will discriminate against them. 
The right and the duty of making discrimina- 
tion among those who are invited to contribute to 
its treasury will not, I dare say, be disputed on this 
floor. The line is drawn, and will be drawn. The 
only question is where it shall be drawn. 

The Committee say that "investigation by the 
executive officers to determine the sources from 
which gifts come is neither justifiable nor practi- 
cal." However this may be it is certainly compe- 
tent and wise for them to make some inquiry re- 
specting the character and reputation of the per- 
sons to whom they apply for assistance. This is the 
simple, practical question to which the whole of 
Principle One and Principle Two must be re- 
duced, and the answer is so obvious that I will not 
waste a word in arguing it. 

Using the discretion which they must use in 
soliciting donations, there are one or two simple 
rules by which they should be guided. 

In the first place, as we have already seen, they 
must not seek the co-operation in their work of 
persons whose gains have been and are being 

[72] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 

made by scandalous immoralities. About this 
there is no dispute. 

In the second place, they must not invite 
gifts from persons who are conspicuous enemies 
of society. 

It is a bitter truth that such a class exists among 
us, and that the nation is now confronting, with 
anxiety and fear, the problem of restraining its 
depredations. The class is composed of persons 
who have rapidly acquired enormous wealth. The 
number of these persons is not large, but the power 
which they have acquired is prodigious. No such 
aggregations of wealth have ever been known. 

The existence of such fortunes is prima facie 
evidence of social injustice. I think that a man 
may, by means fairly legitimate, accumulate a con- 
siderable fortune, but no man can possibly render 
to society a kind and amount of service which 
shall entitle him, within a generation, to heap up 
for himself a fortune of a thousand million or five 
hundred millions of dollars. The existence of such 
fortunes is an enormous peril to a democratic 
state; they could never have been accumulated, in 
a democracy, without a great deal of social and 

[73] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

political rottenness ; and the men who have taken 
advantage of such conditions, or have, perhaps, 
helped to create them, in the building of their for- 
tunes, are entitled to be regarded as the most dan- 
gerous enemies of society. 

These colossal gains have, in all cases, been 
made by practices which are glaringly unjust and 
iniquitous. By obtaining control of the public 
highways and levying tribute on the traffic of com- 
petitors, and taxing the necessaries of life for the 
millions; by corruptly controlling legislatures and 
city councils and thus obtaining franchises and 
contracts, by which they are able to extort from 
the people exorbitant compensation for public ser- 
vice rendered; by enormous inflations of capital, 
and the dishonest manipulation of the stock and 
grain markets and by the exploitation of trust 
funds for private gain, these great accumulations 
have been made. Most of these practices are 
flagrantly illegal, those which are not covered by 
explicit legislation are none the less unjust and 
oppressive. 

The true character of these giant combinations, 
these grasping monopolies is now pretty well un- 

[74] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 

derstood by the people at large. It is evident that 
they must be sharply restrained or our liberties 
will soon disappear. It is evident that they have 
narrowed the bounds of individual initiative — 
that is industrial freedom— and have shut the gates 
of opportunity upon millions; that they have 
greatly intensified the strife of classes; above all 
that they have done more than all other causes put 
together to corrupt and debauch our governments, 
municipal, state and national. The vital relation 
between big business and political corruption has 
been brought to light most vividly within the past 
six months. And the deadly damage that has been 
done to the nation in dulling the sense of business 
honor and intensifying the passion of avarice no 
statistics can ever show. 

Against these merciless and portentous powers 
the conscience of the nation is now pretty well 
aroused; our president has spoken, again and 
again, with clearness and emphasis ; our ex-Presi- 
dent, Mr. Cleveland, has borne strong testimony ; 
the government of the nation and the governments 
of some of the states are exerting their powers to 
restrain and punish these transgressors; quite a 

[75] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

number of them are now under indictment for 
crime and many others are dreading it ; it begins to 
be pretty plain that this is not a windmill that we 
are attacking but a strong and dangerous foe to the 
national life. 

What, now, should be the attitude of the church 
toward men who stand in this relation to the com- 
monwealth ? I think that the church cannot afford 
to cultivate their friendship or seek their co-opera- 
tion in its work. They may be courteous and culti- 
vated gentlemen, estimable husbands and fathers 
and constant attendants upon church and prayer- 
meeting, but if their business methods involve a 
peril to public morality and threaten the public 
welfare the church must not invite their co-opera- 
tion in its work. 

It must not do so because such solicitation in- 
volves an endorsement of them which it has no 
right to give. If the acceptance of a voluntary gift 
implies no recognition of the giver, the solicitation 
of a gift puts the matter upon a different footing. 
The man himself has a right to infer and the pub- 
lic has a right to draw the same inference, that the 
church values his friendship and does not disap- 

[76] 



SHALL ELL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 

prove his conduct. No other interpretation can be 
put upon such an action. The Committee affirms 
in Principle Three that " by the acceptance of gifts 
the officers and members (of the Board) are not 
stopped from criticizing the business methods " of 
donors. Will they say that they would feel entirely 
free to criticise the business methods of a donor 
whose gifts they have diligently solicited for the 
space of two years ? I will do them the credit of not 
imputing to them any such conduct. I know that 
they do not intend to forfeit the respect of gentle- 
men. It is the simple historical fact that the bus- 
iness methods of such givers are not criticised by 
those who have solicited their bounty. When an 
instance of such criticism is produced we may ad- 
mit the validity of this contention. 

The Church is not wise to solicit the gifts of 
multi-millionaires because in this quest its own 
power is apt to be paralysed and its natural re- 
sources dried up. Nothing is more fatal than the 
habit of dependence on such sources. Even when 
there is no moral question raised, the exploiting of 
big donations lessens the interest of the multitude 
of small givers on whom the work must mainly 

[77] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
rest. The gifts of the Congregational churches to 
missions are less now than they were ten years 
ago, though their numbers have considerably in- 
creased and their wealth has probably doubled. I 
think that one main cause of this is an increasing 
tendency to turn to the big givers. 

The Baptist churches, according to Dr. Josiah 
Strong, are giving forty per cent less now than 
ten years ago, even counting the much heralded 
donations of their largest giver. Wise men in 
that church attribute that shrinkage to these big 
gifts. 

Simply as a matter of economy, therefore, the 
policy which the Committee is introducing is likely 
to prove suicidal. But if this policy is followed a 
moral injury is to be apprehended whose effects 
will be much more disastrous. The result of culti- 
vating friendship with men of low moral tone can- 
not be healthful to the work of the Board., Such an 
exhibit as has been put forth, in connection with 
this case, of sordid reasons for the propagation of 
Christian missions illustrates the tendency to 
which I am calling attention. There is no help in 
such alliances ; there is weakness in them. One can 

[78] 



SHALL ELL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 
hear the solemn words of the old prophet : u Woe 
unto them that go down to Egypt for help and stay 
on horses and trust in chariots because they are 
many and in horsemen because they are very 
strong: but they look not unto the Holy One of 
Israel, neither seek the Lord." "Therefore shall 
the strength of Pharaoh be your shame, and the 
trust in the shadow of Egypt your confusion." 

A kindred reason why this Board should not 
make friends with predatory wealth is found in the 
grief and shame and weakness it brings to the 
churches whose agent the Board is, with whose life 
it is identified, and upon whose strength it must 
rely. The Board is not an independent organiza- 
tion. It is the representative of the Congregational 
churches. For whatever it does we must bear the 
responsibility. Of the glorious work it has done, 
and it has done some of the best work this world 
has ever seen, we have had the credit. Of the mis- 
takes it has made, and it has made some woeful 
ones, we have had the blame. 

Now, I am aware that there are Congregational 
churches and Congregational ministers to whom 
such alliances as we are considering are not offen- 

[79] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

sive. They think them suitable and helpful. I do 
not judge them. But there are other churches and 
other ministers, a good many of them, to whom 
associations of this nature are very unwelcome. I 
know them, and I have a right to speak for them, 
for they have told me, in many impressive ways 
what they think, and how they feel. Their judg- 
ment is summed up in these words of a veteran 
missionary now in the field : " It seems to me like 
countenancing evil-doers in their evil doings to so- 
licit and use funds from them for the work of the 
churches of Jesus Christ." There are a great many 
thousands of Congregationalists who share this 
feeling, and I ask the members of this Board most 
earnestly to consider whether the gains they are 
likely to get from these doubtful sources will com- 
pensate them for the injury which they are inflict - 
ing upon their loyal friends in the Congregational 
churches. An injury it is, and a shame it is. You 
may not understand it, but we must be permitted 
to testify for ourselves. We know when we suffer, 
and we know when we are ashamed. The honour 
and the strength of the Congregational churches is 
dear to us, and when anything is done in their 

[80] 



SHALL ELL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 

name that offends our sense of honour the shame 
is ours. 

But it is not only our feelings that are hurt, our 
power is weakened. We know what our tasks are, 
and what are the difficulties before us. We are try- 
ing to bridge the chasm that divides the great 
masses of the working people of this country from 
the church. It is the one urgent business of the 
Christian church to-day. We know that the 
churches, in the view of these people, are in alto- 
gether too close relations with the predatory 
wealth. If we cannot correct this impression we 
cannot win these people. 

" For years," says a professor in one of our lead- 
ing New England colleges, "I have been seeing 
more of the wage-earning people of New England. 
Their alienation from the church is a fact with us. 
. . . They are watching to see what decision is 
to be made of this question of tainted money. If 
the resolution which you have framed as an offset 
to the statement issued by the Prudential Commit- 
tee is rejected, in substance or form, at Seattle, we 
must expect, in this part of the country, to see the 
workingmen turn their backs upon our churches." 

[81] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

Not upon our churches alone. Such action will 
affect not merely the Congregational churches. It 
will be laid up against all the churches. It will be 
regarded as indicating the attitude which the 
Christian Church of this country has taken upon 
this question. And it will send a chill through the 
frame of every workingman who reads it and 
widen and deepen the chasm between the church 
and the entire class of wage-workers. The task of 
every man who is trying to close up that chasm, 
and to convince the working people that the church 
of to-day is the church of Him who came to preach 
the gospel to the poor, will be made more arduous, 
and hope will die in his heart. 

Don't tell me I am making too much of a small 
matter. I know what I am talking about. I have 
been on the firing-line in this warfare for a good 
many years, and I know how the battle is going. 
The appalling thing about it all is that so many of 
those who ought to be our leaders know so little 
and seem to care so little. But I implore you, as one 
whose experience is entitled to some credit, that 
you will not, by your action here to-day, put any 
more obstacles in the way of those who seek to 

[82] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 
make the Congregational Church the church of the 
common people. 

I think I have given adequate reasons why the 
missionary society of the Congregational churches 
should not cultivate the friendship and co-opera- 
tion of men who represent the aggregations of 
predatory wealth which now threaten the life of 
this republic. It may be asked who these men are. 
It is not necessary to name them. There are not 
many of them. It will not be difficult for the offi- 
cers of the society to learn their names by a little 
inquiry among their neighbours. With such a cau- 
tion as the resolution which I am advocating con- 
tains, I am willing to leave the matter to the discre- 
tion of the Committee. 

But I shall be asked whether all rich men are 
not under the same condemnation. I answer no. 
There are multitudes of them who are governed by 
no such purposes. There are thousands and tens of 
thousands of men in large and active business 
whose methods are in the main honourable and 
fair. 

It may be true, I think it is true, that there have 
been evil tendencies among them. Some of them 

[83] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

have been sometimes tempted to imitate the 
schemes of the rebate robbers, and the frenzied 
financiers; and the church may be partly to blame 
for this, for the churches and the colleges have 
been giving their certificates of character to the 
worst of these offenders, and it could hardly be 
wondered at if ambitious men sometimes assumed 
that their methods were laudable and exemplary. 
We owe to our active business men sounder ethi- 
cal instruction — not such as is expressed in the 
moral indifferentism respecting the sources of gifts 
in the statement of principles before us. 

It is sometimes implied that if we are shut out 
from appeal to these doubtful sources, our re- 
sources will be crippled. That is a counsel of cow- 
ardice and infidelity. We have our Congregational 
constituency, and how much more do we need? 
Are not the people of our churches able to support 
their own missionary organizations ? These are 
vines of their own right hand's planting, they have 
watched and watered from the beginning; their 
heart's love is bound up in them; can we not trust 
them to see that they are nourished and carried on 
from strength to strength and from glory to glory ? 

[84] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 

The Congregational people are increasing in num- 
bers, and their financial ability has been growing 
by leaps and bounds. They are well able to do to- 
day, not merely as much as they did ten years ago, 
but twice as much. 

I have already said that they are failing in this, 
sadly failing. I am not quite clear as to the reason 
of this. I am sure that it is not the fault of the offi- 
cers of this society. They have done strong work, 
untiring work, patient and wise and efficient work, 
in trying to bring the claims of the cause which 
they represent home to the hearts of the people of 
the churches. If the churches had responded, as 
they ought to have responded, to their appeals the 
treasury would have been full, continually, and 
there would have been no occasion to go outside 
of our own constituency for the means to carry on 
our work. Because of this failure the officers of this 
society have often had to carry a heavy burden of 
anxiety, and they have been forced to turn in many 
directions for the supply of their necessities. If 
there is fault here, the beginning of blame is with 
us, and not with them. 

When I say "with us," whom do I include? I 

[85] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

include the great majority of the Congregational 
pastors, and the leading laymen of the churches, I 
include myself. I am as much to blame as any- 
body. I have done a little, but not much; and I 
take to myself shame and confusion of face be- 
cause of it. We ought to make all this philanthropic 
and missionary work a great deal more central and 
prominent than it has ever been in the life of our 
churches. We ought to develop the missionary re- 
sources of our churches, and of our local confer- 
ences as they have never been developed. We ought 
to do it, and we can do it. We can go before the 
people of our churches and say to them: "This 
work of bringing Christ to the world is our work, 
and we must do it. The good fight is our fight and 
we can win it. We are not going down to Egypt 
after chariots and horses, we will fight it out our- 
selves. We do not need to discuss tainted money, it 
is enough to say that we need none of it, for we 
know where there is plenty of good honest money 
for all this work. It is the Lord's money, and he 
shall have what he calls for." 

When we face the problem in this way we shall 
soon find ourselves far beyond the need of discuss- 

[86] 



SHALL ILL-GOTTEN GAINS BE SOUGHT? 
ing the question that has occupied our thoughts 
to-day. 

Brethren I have said my word, and I call you to 
witness that it has been spoken, not in anger or 
bitterness, but soberly and kindly. I have indulged 
in no personalities, I have aspersed no man's mo- 
tives. I have been constrained to speak very plain- 
ly, for the juncture is a serious one; there are prin- 
ciples at issue which cannot be trifled with, there 
are interests at stake which ought not to be sac- 
rificed. 

Some of you have been kind enough to assure 
me that I am in a very insignificant minority. That 
may be; I do not know about that; I leave that to 
be decided by you. It will not be the first time that 
I have been in a very small minority, even in this 
Board; but I have seen such small minorities, in a 
very few years, grow to overwhelming majorities. 
"The safe appeal of truth to time," is one on 
which I have learned to rest with hope, and I 
therefore commit with confidence what I have 
said, to you, and to the people of the Congrega- 
tional churches, and to the kindly judgment of all 
honourable men. 

[87] 



The Ethics of Luxurious 
Expenditure 



li AS a rich man a right to spend his money as 
he pleases? What are the ethical rules which 
should govern expenditure? Is the extravagance 
and profusion of the reckless classes beneficial to 
the community ? 

Questions like these are discussed in these days 
with considerable earnestness. Nor is it wholly in a 
captious or envious spirit that these inquiries are pro- 
posed. Many of those who are conscious of no hos- 
tility to wealth which has been fairly won, — some 
even of those who are the possessors of such wealth, 
— are sincerely desirous of knowing the right and 
wrong of the matter. The responsibilities of posses- 
sion are brought home in these days to many on 
whom they have not hitherto pressed heavily, and 
all these subjects are seen to be of vital concern to 
the whole community. Mr. Henry Sidgwick says that 
44 the luxurious living of the high-minded and earn- 

[91] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

est among the possessors of wealth' ' is a high-road on 
which they are travelling " with a certain amount — 
I think at the present time a growing amount — of 
moral uneasiness and perplexity." And those of us 
who are not wealthy, according to modern standards , 
have our qualms about the enjoyments which we al- 
low ourselves. There is good reason, therefore, for 
trying to arrive at some understanding of the prin- 
ciples which should govern luxurious expenditure. 
The popular notion is that the wasteful extrava- 
gance of the rich is a good thing for the commun- 
ity because it puts money into circulation ; that the 
spendthrift is a public benefactor. "When the 
brains are out," cries Carlyle, "why does not the 
solecism die ? " This one has been knocked in the 
head a great many times within the past genera- 
tion, but it is still as lively as ever. A most succinct 
statement of this fallacy is found in a manifesto 
issued during the hard times of 1857 by the Com- 
mon Council of New York. Mr. Ruskin has im- 
paled and preserved the specimen for us in the 
appendix of his "Political Economy of Art": 

Another erroneous idea is that luxurious living, ex- 
travagant dressing, splendid turn-outs and fine houses 

[92] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 

are the causes of distress to a nation. No more erroneous 
impression could exist. Every extravagance that the man 
of $100,000, or $1,000,000 indulges in adds to the 
means, the support, the wealth of ten or a hundred who 
had little or nothing else but their labour, their intellect 
or their taste. If a man of $1,000,000 spends principal 
and interest in ten years and finds himself beggared at 
the end of that time, he has actually made a hundred 
who have catered to his extravagance, employers or em- 
ployed, so much richer by the division of his wealth. He 
may be ruined, but the nation is better off and richer; 
for one hundred minds and hands, with $10,000 apiece, 
are far more productive than one with the whole.* 

No clearer expression of this theory could be 
desired. The New York Common Council of 
forty-eight years ago certainly possessed the power 
of putting a mischievous untruth into precise and 
comprehensible terms, and that is sometimes a 
great service: 

"For a lie that is all a lie may be met and fought with 
outright, 
But a lie that is part a truth is a harder matter to fight." 

The common councilmen consider the case of a 
millionaire who has been " ruined " — who has 
become a "beggar." In this operation, as they 

* " Political Economy of Art," Addenda Note 5. 

[93] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

intimate, a good many people have assisted. But 
the production of beggars is not, as Mr. Ruskin 
suggests, the best sort of industry. The hundreds 
or thousands of people who have been engaged in 
this enterprise might have been better employed. 
Society does not need to have its stock of beggars 
increased, even if they are made out of million- 
aires. Nor is this a mere play upon words, for it is 
the precise truth that many of the rich who are re- 
duced to want are assisted along that road by per- 
sons whose trade it is to minister to those appe- 
tites and infirmities of human nature whose natu- 
ral fruit is beggary. What are the industries which 
profit most by the impoverishment of the spend- 
thrift ? They are quite apt to be those of the horse- 
jockey, the gambler, the liquor-seller, the purveyor 
of social vice. It is not always so, but it is most 
often the case. Into the hands of persons of this 
class we may conjecture that much of this million 
dollars has gone. The expenditure has stimulated 
and fostered such industries as these. Those who 
were already getting their livelihood in these ways 
have been encouraged to keep on in them, and 
some who might have found better employment 

[94] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 
have been enticed into them by the money thus ex- 
pended. It is true that the money was put into cir- 
culation, and there are those who appear to think 
that if money can only be made to circulate, all the 
ends of social welfare are fulfilled; but it would 
seem that something depends on the kind of chan- 
nels through which it circulates, and the kind of 
services for which it sets up a demand. For the 
truth is, as Mr. Ruskin often tells us, that spending 
money is setting people at work, and the spender 
always chooses what kind of work the people who 
receive his money shall be employed about. If that 
work is useful, the community is benefited, but if 
that work is injurious, the more money he puts in 
circulation the greater is the damage to the com- 
munity. 

He who spends money becomes a consumer of 
commodities and of services, and the reckless 
spendthrift is, to a great extent, a consumer of 
services. If the services for which his money calls 
are those in the rendering of which men and wo- 
men are ennobled he is a public benefactor, but if 
they are those by which men and women are cor- 
rupted and degraded he is a malefactor. The 

[95] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
money that goes into circulation through the de- 
bauching of men and women had better be kept 
out of circulation. 

It would seem, therefore, that the philosophers 
of the New York Common Council would need to 
tell us, much more explicitly, where this million- 
aire's money went before we could agree with 
them that he had done a good thing in parting with 
it. For himself, according to their own account, he 
had bought beggary and ruin; and that was a bad 
bargain not only for himself but for the commun- 
ity. And it is, to say the least, not the most com- 
mon thing for a man to go suddenly down from 
millionism to beggary without inflicting some 
serious moral injury on other people in the pro- 
cess. If a man has spent a million dollars on reck- 
less and sensual indulgences, he has done a vast 
amount of harm to the boon companions whom he 
has gathered about him, and to the multitude 
whom he has employed, with his money, to minis- 
ter to his appetites and follies. One million of dol- 
lars, put where it will do the most harm, can do a 
vast amount of mischief in any community. 

The serene optimism of Americans is apt to 

[96] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 
make much of the fact that great fortunes are soon 
scattered. They seem to have the feeling that while 
the rapid accumulation of great wealth may be a 
menace to society the sudden redistribution of it 
by profligate expenditure, can only be a public 
benefit. They look with great complacency upon 
the fact that the hoards heaped up by the grand- 
father and the father are dispersed by the children. 
But this is a superficial estimate. Doubtless there is 
danger in large wealth. It may be used oppressive- 
ly and corruptly. It may be used to suppress 
wholesome competition and to pervert justice. It 
may be used to corrupt legislatures and councils, 
and thus to lay tribute for generations upon an 
entire community. But, on the whole, society is apt 
to suffer less direct injury from the millionaire 
who is accumulating wealth than from his spend- 
thrift children who are scattering it. It is true, no 
doubt, that the millionaire often saves too much 
and spends too little; that if he would spend, ju- 
diciously, wisely, with benevolent intent, a larger 
share of his gains, and not be so eager to add to his 
hoard, a better distribution of wealth would be 
effected. There is danger, no doubt, that through 

[97] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

the excessive tendency to accumulation, wealth 
does sometimes " rest in mounded heaps," and that 
one need of the time is the combination of a larger 
liberality with the national thrift, so that the ac- 
cumulations thus gathered, even in the hands of 
those who gather them, 

"Smit with freer light shall slowly melt 
In many streams, to fatten lower lands " 

Yet, recognizing this great defect in the adminis- 
tration of wealth, on the part of rich men who are 
neither extortioners nor corruptionists, but who 
are simply heaping up money for money's sake; 
and admitting the economic injury which results 
from the " under-consumption " which they en- 
force, it still remains true that this injury is less 
than that which is caused by the reckless squan- 
dering of their successors. I have seen, in my time, 
several large fortunes dispersed by spendthrift 
heirs; I have watched the process with a good deal 
of interest; and it seems to me very clear that put- 
ting money into circulation is not the unmixed 
good which it is sometimes thought to be. Even 
when the expenditure is not for immoral purposes, 

[98] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 

the profusion of the spendthrift is apt to be injur- 
ious to those who share it; they get what he dis- 
penses without paying full value for it, and that is 
always a doubtful good. 

But the effect of this conscienceless spending 
upon those who are employed by the spenders to 
minister to vice and sensuality and reckless folly is 
baneful in the extreme. By such a dispersion the 
seeds of social pestilence and poverty are sown 
broadcast. Any one who can calmly contemplate 
all this, with no other feeling than satisfaction be- 
cause money is thus put into circulation, must be 
taking a very superficial view of what is going on 
before his eyes. 

Such widespread moral injuries must also have 
serious economic consequences; the presence of 
such classes in the community tends to discourage 
thrift and to undermine the sobriety and frugality 
out of which all social welfare springs, and, as Mr. 
Ruskin intimates, it is not only the millionaire 
himself who is made a beggar by his vicious pro- 
fusion, but quite a crop of beggars is likely to 
spring from his sowing. 

It may be said that this argument is superfluous, 

[99] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

since the evils of profligate expenditure are patent 
to all. I wish they were. But the truth is that there 
are large classes in all our cities who think that 
profligate expenditure is good for business, and 
who either openly favour it or refuse to oppose it for 
this reason. It has been stoutly argued more than 
once, by public officials in my own city, that the 
town ought to be kept wide open, because much 
money is thus put into circulation. Such measures 
are sure to be advocated, on the ground of public 
policy, at every municipal election. The major 
premise of these logicians is the same as that of the 
New York Councilmen, and of many of those who 
rejoice in reckless expenditure, that whatever puts 
money into circulation is a good thing. It becomes, 
therefore, necessary to subject this major propo- 
sition to a rigorous analysis. 

Many of those who advocate luxurious expen- 
diture as good economic policy do not, however, 
believe that vicious expenditure benefits society. 
Or, if they adhere to the proposition that putting 
money into circulation is a good thing in itself, 
they can clearly see that when it is spent upon in- 
dulgences that are positively immoral and de- 

[100] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 

grading, the economic benefits of the distribution 
are outweighed by the moral injuries, and there- 
fore they would not favour a luxury that was posi- 
tively immoral. But mere extravagance, they 
would say — profusion in feasting and dressing 
and decoration — this comes under no such con- 
demnation, and this ought to be commended, 
rather than censured, because it aids in the wider 
distribution of the wealth of the community and 
furnishes employment and livelihood to some who 
would otherwise be in want. This brings us to the 
consideration of luxury pure and simple, in its re- 
lation to the common welfare. 

But luxury, pure and simple, is, after all, an 
elusive category. As one Frenchman has said, " it 
defies exact and scientific definition." That which 
to one person or one generation is a luxury, to an- 
other would be one of the unquestioned necessaries 
of life. w A shirt for the body and a chimney in the 
house," says Laveleye, "were great luxuries in the 
Middle Ages; to-day they are necessities even for 
the poorest." A sixteenth century censor of the 
times and the manners in England bitterly com- 
plains that in his day so many chimneys had been 

[101] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

erected in England, and that in so many families 
earthen and tin dishes had replaced the wooden 
ones! These, to him, were signs of a culpable ex- 
travagance. Within a hundred years it has been 
written that a Scotch peasant wears shoes not to 
protect his feet, but to maintain his social stand- 
ing. There are men yet living who can remember 
the time when the introduction of stoves into meet- 
ing houses in New England was stoutly resisted on 
the ground that artificial warmth in the house of 
God was an enervating luxury. The sugar and tea 
and coffee and spices and butchers' meat and 
wheat bread upon the workingman's table, and 
the paper hangings and pictures on his walls, and 
the running water in his sink, were, not long ago, 
luxuries which only the richest could afford. If we 
extend the meaning of the word to all articles of 
consumption which are not strictly necessary to 
the maintenance of life it will be true not only that 
all classes are now consumers of luxuries, but the 
larger part of the expenditure even of those fam- 
ilies whose income is not more than a dollar and 
a half a day goes for luxuries rather than for the 
necessaries of life. For the progress of material 

[102] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 

civilization has put within the reach of the vast 
majority not only that which suffices for the main- 
tenance of life, but much that conduces to a pleas- 
urable existence. If, then, we agree with Mande- 
ville in defining luxury as including everything 
which exceeds the baldest necessities of life, we 
shall be obliged to say that every human being in 
our land and time ought to be living luxuriously. 
On the other hand it is not difficult to point out 
instances of extravagant expenditure which, in any 
state of civilization, must be censured as luxur- 
ious. Take the picture which Roscher gives us of 
the luxury of Rome in the days of her decline : 

Nero paid three hundred talents — [about $140,000] 
— for a murrhine vase. The two acres which sufficed 
the ancient citizens for a farm were not now enough to 
make a fish-pond for imperial slaves. The sums carried 
by the exiles with them to cover their travelling ex- 
penses and to live on for a time, were greater than the 
fortunes of the most distinguished citizens had been in 
former times. There was such a struggle among the 
people to possess the freshest sea-fish that, at last, they 
would taste only such as they had seen alive upon the 
table. We have the most exalted descriptions of the 
beautiful changes of colour undergone by the dying fish; 
and a special infusion was invented to enable the epi- 

[103] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

cure better to enjoy the spectacle. Of the transparent 
garments of his time Seneca says that they neither pro- 
tected the body nor covered the nakedness of nature. 
People kept herds of sheep dyed in purple, although 
their natural white must have been much more agree- 
able to any one with an eye for the tasteful. Not only on 
the roofs of houses were fish-ponds to be seen, but gar- 
dens even hanging on towers, and which must have 
been as small, ugly and inconvenient as they were costly. 
Especially characteristic of the time was the custom of 
dissolving pearls in wine, not to make it more palatable 
but more expensive. . . . People changed their 
dress at table, inconvenient as it was to do so, occasion- 
ally as often as eleven times. Perfumes were mixed with 
the wine that was drunk, much as it spoiled its taste, 
only that the drinkers might emit sweet odours from 
every pore.* 

All the resources of absurdity were taxed to pro- 
vide preposterous pleasures for these Romans of 
the decadence, as when a noted artist set before his 
guests a repast composed of costly trained singing 
birds, and when the wife of Nero took with her on 
a journey five hundred asses, all wearing gold and 
silver shoes, in order that cosmetic baths might be 
daily provided for her from their milk. In truth 
what Seneca says of Caligula appears to describe 

* Roscher's " Political Economy " II, 241-2 

[104] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 
the mind of these voluptuaries : u The one thing he 
most craved was the impossible; for that is the 
principle of luxury, it delights in the perverse." 

All such forms of luxurious expenditure we shall 
censure without misgiving. Their utter irrational- 
ity condemns them. To be a fool may be an in- 
alienable right of the propertiless, but no man to 
whom large amounts of social power have been 
entrusted has any right to play the fool in his use 
of it. The duty of such to be sane is one of their 
primary obligations. 

Forms of luxurious expenditure whose purpose 
is largely ostentation are equally censurable. 
Especially true is this in a democracy. Where caste 
is fundamental in society it may be necessary to 
emphasize distinctions; but a society which is 
founded on equality and fraternity ought to be as 
free as possible from violent social contrasts. The 
man who delights in outshining and overcrowing 
his neighbours has lost the democratic spirit. This 
is not a condemnation of things beautiful, it is a 
protest against the splendour that is flaunted in 
men's faces ; it is a reprobation of the parading of 
wealth by those who regard it as the badge of social 

[105] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

superiority. Not a little of the luxurious expendi- 
ture of republican America has no worthier mo- 
tive than this. The ostentatious purpose is em- 
blazoned on all the belongings of many of the new 
rich ; their determination to advertise their wealth 
and compel the whole world to see what superior 
persons they are could not be made any more em- 
phatic if they sent a trumpeter before them in the 
streets to proclaim it. The exhibition is offensive; 
that seems to be the purpose of it, and it provokes 
resentment. By all such unsocial behaviour the 
social bond is weakened. 

To these moral considerations must be added 
the condemnation, upon economic grounds, of the 
reckless profusion of the luxurious classes. The 
waste is censurable. We have no right to consume 
so much upon our pleasures. It is here that we 
come upon the fallacy which we have been consid- 
ering — that all extravagance is beneficial to soci- 
ety because it puts money in circulation. But here, 
also, we must note the fact that it makes a vast dif- 
ference to society what is purchased with the 
money thus put in circulation. Outside the realm 
of immoral indulgence there is a consumption of 

[106] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 
goods that is destructive, and a consumption that 
is reproductive. We may spend our money in such 
a way as to increase the permanent wealth of the 
country, and we may spend it in such a way as to 
lessen the national wealth. 

Suppose that a city gives an order for fifty thou- 
sand dollars worth of fireworks, to be consumed in 
a popular fete. This gives employment to many 
persons and puts fifty thousand dollars in circula- 
tion. The night before the fete, two amounts of 
property are in existence, the fifty thousand dol- 
lars which has been paid or is to be paid for the 
work done and the materials employed, and the 
fireworks themselves which represent this com- 
bination of labour and material substances. The 
next night the money is here, but the fireworks 
have gone out of existence — that amount of prop- 
erty is absolutely destroyed. 

Suppose, instead of the fireworks, the city had 
devoted the money to pictures for an art gallery, or 
had opened a small park in a crowded quarter, or 
had improved its sewerage. The money would have 
gone into circulation just as effectually; it would 
have employed just as many men; it would have 

[107] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

fed just as many mouths, and when the worK was 
finished not only would the money thus circulated 
have been in existence, but the product of the in- 
dustry which it set in operation would be still here, 
a permanent possession, providing health and pleas- 
ure and social well-being for many generations. 

Now the truth is that much of the luxurious ex- 
penditure of the extravagant classes is of the 
nature of fireworks ; it goes for objects that are con- 
sumed in an hour and leave nothing behind. Cut 
flowers, costly decorations, costumes that can be 
worn but once, expensive foods and drinks, all 
such things are purchased for this money and the 
values which they embody are blotted out of exist- 
ence. A large number of people have been em- 
ployed to produce that which gives but a moment- 
ary pleasure. They might have been employed irf 
the production of that which would have yielded 
lasting benefit. 

But this is not all. This luxurious expenditure of 
the rich is apt to be purely selfish. The pleasure 
which it produces is shared only by themselves and 
by those of their own narrow circle from whom 
they may expect like benefits. It serves not to iden- 

[108] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 

tify them with the community at large, but to sepa- 
rate them from their fellow-men. And the truth 
must not be evaded that this extensive expenditure 
upon ephemeral pleasures is largely at the expense 
of the humbler classes. The labour which is em- 
ployed in providing these costly luxuries was with- 
drawn from the channels of useful production, and 
might have helped to make food and fuel and 
clothing and shelter more plentiful and therefore 
cheaper. Here is the economic fact, clearly put by a 
master of the science : 

The total amount of income we, or a community, yet 
have, is so small that any undue consumption by indi- 
viduals must put a painful limit, not only to the lux- 
uries but to the comforts and even the necessaries of the 
many. The question of the right to consume would not 
in fact, emerge but for one thing: that the world is yet 
poor. To one who realizes the giant strides made by 
invention in the extractive industries, in manufacture, 
and above all in transport — which does more than any- 
thing else to utilize wealth that else would waste itself on 
the desert, it is a little surprising to find how poor their 
rich England is. Equally divided, the income of this 
country would give about <£36 per head or <£180 per 
average family of five. It follows that no distribution of 
income would allow every one to have even these com- 
forts which some of us count necessaries. Of course it 

[109] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

must not be concluded that those families whose in- 
comes are more than .£180 per year are robbing other 
people of their surplus. As we have seen, it is not receipt 
nor even expenditure of income that determines this, 
but consumption of it. The squire's income of thou- 
sands may be mostly spent in calling out incomes of 
hundreds to the tenants on his estate, who in turn call 
out incomes of tens to the village shops. What we can 
say is that every family which consumes, or lets go to 
waste, more than £180, takes that value of wealth clean 
out of the world. If it were not taken out of the world, it 
would be added to the community's stock and be avail- 
able for consumption later on. Others may have our 
cake although we spend it; but we cannot eat our cake 
and let others have it! This consideration, it seems to 
me, is obvious enough, if we consider how much of all 
incomes goes to butcher, baker, grocer and the like.* 

Such an analysis may serve to show us, not only 
that no man liveth to himself, but also that it 
makes some difference to the poor how the rich are 
living. It would be a mistake to demand that the 
rich restrict themselves to the bare necessaries of 
life; it is needful that they should spend their 
money freely : the welfare of the community is in- 
deed promoted by a free expenditure; but some 
lawful ways of spending money bring temporary 

* " Studies in Economics," by William Smart, p. 300. 

[110] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 

benefits to a few and other ways bring permanent 
benefits to many. There are modes of consumption 
in which the consumer is wholly selfish : there are 
other modes in which he shares his good things 
with his neighbours. 

One man purchases a tract of land, calls in the 
aid of the landscape gardener and makes it all 
beautiful with trees and flowers and fountains and 
statuary and shady walks, and then he puts a 
high wall and a thick hedge about it all, and shuts 
all this beauty of God's world away from the sight 
of his neighbours, keeping it for the delectation of 
the select few whom he may admit to his demesne. 
Another may do what opulent citizens have some- 
times done — he may secure and beautify such an 
enclosure and give it to his fellow-men that they 
may enjoy it with him. The one method will put 
as much money in circulation as the other: but the 
latter puts not only money but love in circulation, 
and this is the kind of currency of which the world 
has largest need. All this is true, even of prosper- 
ous times. But when there is widespread distress 
and multitudes of the unemployed are besieging 
the workshops and factories in vain, and hun- 

[in] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

dreds of thousands are suffering for want of the 
necessaries of life, the demand for a conscientious 
expenditure of our surplus is doubly imperative. 
Take a case much discussed several years ago, 
when there was serious industrial depression. A 
quarter of a million of dollars was expended on a 
masked ball. Much emphasis was then put upon 
the fact that all this money was to be circulated. It 
is true, and it is also true that those who thus ex- 
pended it advertised their possession of great 
wealth, and their purpose of using it to deepen and 
widen the chasm which separates them from their 
kind. That they had the legal right to use their 
money in this way is beyond question : whether one 
may wisely consume his possessions in such a 
manner as to excite the resentments of his neigh- 
bours is not so clear. "It is extravagance like 
this," says Dr. Cunningham, "that is to blame 
for setting class against class : jealousy itself finds 
little to fasten on in the case of a wealthy man who 
uses his wealth wisely and well, but it is aroused 
by evidence of extravagance and dissipation, and 
when aroused it is ready to condemn everything 
which it can not appreciate. " 

[112] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 

But, questions of right aside, it is beyond dis- 
pute that one ought to use his opportunities and 
powers in such a manner as to produce the largest 
possible amount of welfare and happiness. One 
can spend his money in such a way as to secure for 
himself and his intimates much exclusive per- 
sonal gratification, and to confer a small incidental 
benefit on a few others; and he may expend it in 
such a way as to get some wholesome pleasure out 
of it for himself, and to extend the benefit of it to a 
great many others. Where this choice is possible 
the good man will choose the latter method. And 
the choice is always possible. There is never the 
slightest difficulty in finding ways of making 
money widely serviceable to the community. A 
quarter of a million could be used in a score of 
ways which would avoid all semblance of ostenta- 
tion, and would confer great and lasting benefits 
on a multitude. It would build and stock a beauti- 
ful free library and reading-room, or a gymna- 
sium and playground with baths, in some crowded 
quarter; it would furnish a splendid outfit for a 
social settlement; it would erect and equip a man- 
ual training-school for the poor children. Better 

[US] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

than any of these, perhaps, it would build great 
tenement houses where a hundred families might 
find healthy and comfortable homes at a moderate 
rent, thus returning to the builder a reasonable 
interest on his outlay, and at the same time con- 
ferring upon a large number of human beings an 
inestimable benefit. Any of these enterprises would 
distribute this sum of money far more widely than 
it could be distributed by a masked ball, and 
among people who stand in greater need of it; they 
would set in motion influences which might, for 
many generations, brighten the lives of multitudes ; 
and which would help to strengthen the social 
bond and promote peace and good-will among 
men. 

The fact that those who are making such ex- 
penditures are swift to claim that their needy 
neighbours are to receive some benefit from their 
profusion is a hopeful sign. It shows some sense of 
a social obligation on the part of those who live 
luxuriously. They could not quite justify this ex- 
travagance if nobody besides themselves got any 
good out of it. This is the feeling that needs to be 
cultivated. 

[114] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 
What Mr. Smart calls "the socializing of con- 
sumption " is the one lesson that all of us, rich and 
poor, need to learn. Spending money is essentially 
a social act; it always affects others, as well as our- 
selves ; and if we have much to spend the manner of 
our expenditure may profoundly influence, for 
good or ill, the community in which we live. We 
have the power of choosing that our expenditure 
shall promote health, happiness, friendliness, 
peace; let that responsibility come home to our 
consciences. There is something more to consider 
in the spending of money than our own personal 
pleasure. It is a good thing to spend it freely, if we 
spend it for the best things. We have a perfect 
right to use it to purchase for ourselves health, 
strength, knowledge, power, if we only remember 
that these are possessions which must always be 
used in the service of our kind. " No man liveth unto 
himself. " The spending of our money is a matter 
of serious consideration, not only to ourselves, but 
to the community in which we live. Some ways of 
spending it are far better for society than others : 
and right-minded men and women will desire to 
put it where it will do the most good. It can be 

[ H5 ] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

flung out carelessly, bearing the contempt of those 
who dispense it for those who receive it; it can be 
hurled at them as a deadly missile, hissing with 
hatred, and arousing only resentment and wrath 
in their breasts; it can carry with it moral poison 
and contagion, or it can express the sympathy and 
the thoughtful love of those from whom it goes. 
There are a great many ways of putting money in 
circulation. What goes with it is often quite as im- 
portant as the money itself. It can go forth as our 
messenger, proclaiming the gospel of good-will 
and peace, and there is no messenger whom we 
can send whose word is more likely to be heard. 
Says a well-known political economist: 

If consumers were guided by considerations of how 
best to consume for the interest of society as a whole, 
immense sums of wealth might be kept in the world that 
are now, thoughtlessly and without adequate return, 
taken out of it. and other immense sums might give life 
and happiness to circles and crowds instead of to in- 
dividuals and families.* 

That sums up the whole matter. There are those, 
of course, who do not recognize any other law than 
their own pleasure. With them considerations of 

* " Studies in Economics." p. 283. 

[116] 



THE ETHICS OF LUXURIOUS EXPENDITURE 

this kind will have no weight. But it begins to be 
pretty evident to the political economists as well as 
to the preachers, that a society composed of per- 
sons of this class is doomed to destruction. We 
shall not hold this democracy of ours together very 
long unless a different spirit from this takes pos- 
session of the hearts of those to whom great social 
power has been committed. We sometimes hear 
complaints that there is not enough money in cir- 
culation. We often suffer from that cause, doubt- 
less, but far more because there is not enough love 
in circulation. A little more love, discerning love, 
in the hearts of those who hold the money, would 
soon find a way of effecting a better distribution of 
the money. There is reason to doubt whether any 
method of forcible or compulsory distribution will 
ever quite solve this difficult and delicate social 
problem. 



[117] 



The Church and the Nation* 



* Sermon preached at the Seventy-ninth Annual Meeting 
of the Congregational Home Missionary Society in Springfield, 
Mass., May 31, 1905. 



IT is a happy coincidence which has placed the 
anniversary of the Congregational Home Mission- 
ary Society on Decoration Day. Those who know 
what the Society stands for and what its record has 
been will feel no incongruity between the two ob- 
servances. Each may lend something to the other of 
remembrance and of suggestion. The veterans may 
help us to recall events that show us the real sig- 
nificance of our work, and we may be able to show 
them that there are still for them standards to lift 
up and battles to fight. 

The Congregational Home Missionary Society 
was known, forty years ago, as the AmericanHome 
Missionary Society. It was then, as now, the agent 
of the Congregational churches, but its name was 
then, I think, even more significant of its real char- 
acter than it is to-day, for its larger purpose has 
always been national more than denominational. 

[121] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

Its motto might well have been Christo et patrice, 
for Christ and Fatherland. It cares less for making 
Congregationalists than for making patriots and 
Christians; it values its denominational specialties 
only as aids in the building of character which shall 
serve the Kingdom of God, whose largest forms 
appear, not in the church, but in the nation. 

It was the deep consciousness of a great respon- 
sibility for the national welfare which filled the 
hearts of the Congregational people in the middle 
decades of the last century, and which drew forth 
the splendid enterprise by which they went out and 
took possession of the great Northwest. Some- 
thing made them see that this vast domain was of 
priceless value to the nation, and that it must be 
stocked with ideas and influences which would hold 
it true to the traditions of liberty. When the war 
broke out the great States of Illinois and Wiscon- 
sin and Minnesota and Iowa and Nebraska and 
Kansas were filled with a population well satu- 
rated with the ideas that had given New England 
her influence in the councils of the nation. That 
the American Home Missionary Society had done 
all this work must not be claimed, but it had had a 

[122] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

very large share in it. Certain it is that the Con- 
gregationalists of those great States were at the 
front in all that conflict. Wherever there was a 
Congregational church there was a recruiting 
agency for the army of the Union, though many of 
them, as the conflict deepened, were nearly de- 
spoiled of their male membership through the ab- 
sence of their men in the field. The war record of 
these American Home Missionary churches of the 
Northwest is one of which we shall never have oc- 
casion to be ashamed. If the great Northwest had 
not been passionately loyal in that conflict, we 
could never have held this nation together; and we 
may safely claim that among the influences which 
made and kept it loyal, not the least important 
was the work of this Home Missionary Society. 
And one who returns, as I have just returned from 
a journey of nearly three thousand miles through 
the fertile fields, and the thriving towns and cities 
of that great Northwest; one who has been looking 
into the faces of a good many thousands of these 
Western Congregationalists and has seen their 
country planted thick with their schools and col- 
leges and churches, and has felt the thrill of their 

[123] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
vital enthusiasm for righteousness, and has been 
able to realize how large a part these States must 
bear in the future life of the nation, will have 
gained some new impression of the service which 
has been rendered to the nation by the society 
whose anniversary we to-day are keeping. 

This anniversary must always take on a patri- 
otic as well as a religious character, and it is there- 
fore fitting that it should occur on this day, and 
that it should be participated in by the veterans of 
the Civil War. And I desire to draw your atten- 
tion to certain truths that lie at the foundation of 
the church and of the nation, truths which we are 
in danger of forgetting, but of which on this day 
we may fully be reminded. 

The question is sometimes raised whether this 
is a Christian nation. It is certainly not a Christian 
nation in any formal or legal sense. Christianity is 
not established by law, and one of the glories of our 
Constitution is the provision that religious ob- 
servances shall never be enforced by law within our 
borders. Mr. Benjamin Kidd points to that article 
as the high-water mark of Western Civilization. 
Indeed, I think we may say that the nation would 

[ 124 ] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

not be Christian, in the highest and truest sense, if 
it undertook to enforce by law Christian beliefs 
or observances. That would be an infraction of a 
principle that is fundamental in Christianity. A 
compulsory faith is a contradiction in terms. 

But if the nation cannot make itself Christian by 
legal enactments, it may, nevertheless, be essen- 
tially Christian in spirit and in purpose. A nation, 
as well as a man, may have a Christian character. 
And while we have no desire to see the establish- 
ment of any form of religion by law in this land, 
most of us would be willing to see the nation in its 
purposes and policies and ruling aims becoming 
essentially Christian. 

It is also sometimes questioned in these days 
whether the church is Christian. Before trying to 
answer, it might be profitable to ask ourselves pre- 
cisely what is meant by that great adjective. The 
church is certainly seeking to be Christian in its 
doctrines, in its ordinances, in its confessions; it 
calls itself by Christ's name; it professes to be- 
lieve the truth He taught, and it is, no doubt, in an 
imperfect way, following Him. Yet we must not fail 
to see that it is not in its doctrines, its ceremonies, 

[125] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
or its confessions, but in its character that the 
church most clearly proves its right to bear the 
Christian name. The question with the church, as 
with the man, is not so much whether it professes the 
Christian faith as whether it lives the Christian life. 

Now there is one test which we have a right to 
apply to the church and to the nation, to see 
whether they deserve the Christian name. I will 
not say that it is the only test; it is not. I think that 
we could conceive of characters which would meet 
this particular test and which would yet be un- 
worthy of the Christian name. But while the qual- 
ity which this test demands is not the only essen- 
tial quality of a Christian man or a Christian 
church or a Christian nation, it is one of the essen- 
tial qualities; it is not enough to make a Christian, 
but there can be no Christian without it. What is 
this quality? It is brought to light in the verses 
which I have read for a text. 

These words are the first public declaration 
made by our Lord of the nature of His mission. He 
had gone, on the Sabbath day, into the synagogue 
of the village where He had always lived, and after 
the reading of the law and the prayers, the reader 

[126] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 
had handed to Him the roll of the Prophet Isaiah. 
Taking it in His hands, He read from it these 
words: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, 
because He hath anointed Me to preach good 
tidings to the poor; He hath sent Me to proclaim 
release to the captives, and recovery of sight to 
the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised; 
to preach the acceptable word of the Lord. And 
He closed the book and gave it back to the at- 
tendant and sat down; and the eyes of all the 
synagogue were fastened on Him. And He began 
to say unto them, To-day hath this Scripture 
been fulfilled in your ears." 

It is a most impressive proclamation by the 
Prince of life Himself of the nature of the Kingdom 
He had come to establish. You may call it His in- 
augural message. 

Jesus quotes these great words of the prophet as 
having their fulfilment in Himself. He is the an- 
ointed one, the Messiah; the Spirit of God is upon 
Him; and the proof of His divine commission, of 
His Messianic royalty, is seen in the fact that He 
becomes the servant and the helper of the poor and 
the unfortunate and the needy. 

[127] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

It is for this that He is anointed; this is the 
meaning of His Messiahship. Surely there can be no 
more explicit or authoritative statement. But He 
takes occasion more than once to confirm it, not- 
ably on that occasion when John the Baptist, in 
prison, losing heart and hope, sent his disciples to 
ask Jesus, " Art thou He that was to come, or must 
we look for another ? " And Jesus told them to go 
back and tell John what they had heard and seen 
— that the needy and the helpless and the miser- 
able had found in Him a friend, and that the gos- 
pel was preached to the poor. 

There can be no doubt, as a matter of history, 
that these were the people with whom He most 
clearly identified Himself; it was the reproach 
of those who hated Him that His friends were 
among the lowly; it was the testimony of His 
companions that the common people heard Him 
gladly. 

We may say, then, that by His own testimony, 
and the testimony of those who stood closest to 
Him, this was the characteristic of His life and mis- 
sion — this was the sign of His Messiahship — 
that He identified Himself with the lowly and the 

[128] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 
needy; that He was the friend of the weak and the 
poor and the friendless. 

If this was the characteristic of the Christ, it 
must be the characteristic of the Christian. The 
man, the church, the nation that rightly bears the 
Christian name must possess this characteristic. 
They must have other qualities also, but they must 
not lack this. No matter how many other good 
things may be said about them, if this cannot be 
said, you must not call them Christians. This is 
what Paul meant when he said: 

" If I speak with the tongues of men and of an- 
gels, but have not love, I am become sounding 
brass or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift 
of prophecy and know all mysteries and all 
knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove 
mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." 

I think that this study helps us to grasp one, at 
least, of the essential meanings of the great adjec- 
tive with which we are dealing. And with this 
meaning in our minds what shall we say ? Is this a 
Christian nation ? Does it possess a Christian char- 
acter ? Is its life a Christian life ? 

I know that there are some who will promptly 

[129] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

say, u No; the nation in this sense is not Christian, 
and we do not want it to be. No nation ought to 
possess any such character or have any such pur- 
poses. It is neither possible nor desirable that a 
nation should live a Christian life or possess a 
Christian character. The business of a nation is not 
charity. Its function is not to practise benevolence, 
but simply to do justice. It ought to keep people 
from trespassing on one another; it ought to pre- 
serve the peace, and provide for the common de- 
fence; it ought, so far as possible, to give every one 
a chance to exercise his own powers, and there it 
ought to end." 

I know that much can be said for this theory of 
the life of a nation, but I doubt whether any con- 
siderable number of human beings can be held to- 
gether very long upon this basis. I do not believe 
that political society or industrial society or any 
other society will endure on a purely individualis- 
tic basis. There can be no law of profitable human 
intercourse of which love is not the heart and the 
fulfilment. 

If all men were born equal in physical and men- 
tal equipment; if all were started in a race of life 

[130] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

with equal powers and opportunities, this rule of 
laissez faire might be a practicable rule, but it is 
not so; there are vast inequalities; multitudes 
come into life handicapped in a thousand ways 
with evil inheritance, and crippling environments, 
and to fling them all together into the competitive 
arena and bid them fight it out, is to consign many 
of them to degradation and destruction. The truth 
is that this is a world where compassion must be a 
constant quantity; there is no kind of human asso- 
ciation in which it can be spared; and when the 
State — that is " all of us " — undertakes to ad- 
just our human relations, it will not be possible to 
dispense with compassion. 

In truth this nation has never tried to do any 
such thing. Its compassion has always found ex- 
pression in great public ministries to the defective 
and unfortunate classes. The nation has some- 
times been selfish and heartless and cruel; it is not 
perfect; but a great humanity has been constantly 
revealed in our national life. I remember, many 
years ago, quoting to M . James Bryce, who 
knows us so much better than we know ourselves, 
a remark of one of our own publicists, that Amer- 

[131] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

ican legislation, in the state and the nation, was 
"ignorant, clumsy and brutal." He answered 
quickly, "Ignorant? yes; clumsy? yes, of course; 
but brutal ? no, that is not true. The legislation of 
America is full of the most humane intentions." 

I am sure that this has been true. Lowell knew 
his own Motherland when he spoke of her as 

She that lifts up the manhood of the poor, 

She of the open heart and open door, 

With room about her hearth for all mankind. 

It would seem to be nearly inevitable that when 
government is of the people and by the people, and 
when the people are compassionate and kind, their 
compassion and kindness will find expression in 
their national life. That such has been the case, in 
some good measure, can hardly be denied. It was a 
great impulse of sympathy with the lowly that 
drew this nation into its costly struggle with slav- 
ery; it is a humane sentiment that has thrown open 
the door to the millions who have sought our 
shores from other lands; it is an altruistic habit 
that has prompted us as a people to interpose when 
we could in behalf of oppressed peoples, and to 
stretch forth our hand of sympathy toward the 

[132] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

weak and the suffering. I think that without boast- 
ing, we may claim that this nation, in spite of all 
its faults and sins, has done more than any other 
nation of history to introduce into diplomacy and 
international law a larger sentiment of humanity, 
and to make possible the coming of the day for 
which the great Englishwoman so passionately 
prayed, when 

Each Christian nation shall take upon her 
The law of the Christian man in vast ; 

The crown of the getter shall fall to the donor, 
And last shall be first while first shall be last, 

And to love best shall still be to reign unsurpassed. 

You observe that I have been putting all these 
statements about the character and purpose of the 
nation into the past tense. And you wish to know 
whether I mean to suggest this is no longer her 
character or her purpose. No; I would not say that. 
But I do mean to leave the question open whether 
there are signs that the nation is in danger of fall- 
ing from this high position. It is not pessimism, it 
is simply a wise patriotism which admits such a 
possibility and bravely faces it. 

It must be confessed that the nation is exposed 

[133] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

to perils on this side. When we were all poor, it 
was easy to think of and care for the poor; now 
that many of us are very rich and strong, and more 
of us hope to be, and most of us want to be, the 
claims of the poor and the weak seem less urgent. 
There is a very powerful class which has little 
sympathy with the humble and the weak, which 
builds up its fortunes, indeed, by levying tribute 
upon their earnings; and there are hundreds of 
thousands of others who look admiringly upon the 
exploits of this class and wonder if they may not 
sometimes be able to imitate them; and there is a 
great multitude of others whose interests, in one 
way and another, are identified with the strong 
and who do not like to antagonize or offend them, 
so that powerful influences are at work to lower the 
tone of the national feeling toward the less fortu- 
nate classes. The enormous accumulations of 
wealth which have been heaped up in this country 
within the past quarter of a century have done 
much to modify the national character and to 
sophisticate the public conscience. It cannot be 
denied that this plutocracy tends to become ag- 
gressive and oppresive; it has often shown but 

[134] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

slight regard for the laws which have been enacted 
to restrain its greed; it has sought, and often with 
too much success, to control the legislatures and 
the courts in its own interests. 

While wealth has been mounting up with gigan- 
tic strides, at one end of the social scale, poverty, 
with stealthy step, has been creeping in at the 
other. There are no adequate statistics on which 
definite statements can be based, but a book like 
that of Mr. Robert Hunter, with its cumulative 
presentation, makes it all too probable that the 
number of those who are always living on the 
verge of want is growing fast. Prosperous people 
are much inclined either to discredit such state- 
ments or to charge all this increasing want to drink 
or indolence, but the deeper reason is that oppor- 
tunity is being contracted, and incentive with- 
drawn, and burdens increased; while accident and 
disease which are the direct result of human 
greed, and which are preventable by wise social 
regulation, are crippling and disabling many. 

Certain it is that there is increasing discontent 
among the people at the bottom of the social scale. 
They believe that they are being burdened and laid 

[135] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

under tribute by the combinations of selfish 
wealth. These vast fortunes have been drawn 
from the industries to which they are giving the 
strength of their lives for meagre reward, and they 
feel that the distribution is inequitable. It seems 
to them that vast power has been conferred upon 
the few, and that it is used for the oppression of the 
many. If this is done by law the laws are at fault; 
if it is done by the evasion or defiance of law the 
fault is with those who administer the laws. In any 
case the final responsibility rests with the nation — 
with "all of us." Must we not sorrowfully confess 
that the nation, drunk with the passion of accumu- 
lation, has been growing quite too careless of the 
interests of its humbler people ? Must we not fear 
that if the nation once possessed a Christian char- 
acter, she is in danger of losing it ? Can we deny 
that elements and influences which tend to sepa- 
rate the poor from the rich and to harden the 
hearts of the rich against the poor, have been gain- 
ing too much control in our national life ? Must we 
not say that instead of identifying itself with the 
fortunes of its humblest people, and making sure, 
first of all, of their welfare, it has been permitting 

[136] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

its power to be used, more and more, by the strong 
for their aggrandizement ? 

A philosophic observer, whose home is now in 
Washington, said to me the other day, *' It is ap- 
palling to any one who lives at the national capital 
and watches what is going on, to see the extent to 
which money rules everything." 

This tendency does not, indeed, dominate all 
lives, even in Washington. There are a good many 
yet who have not bowed the knee to Mammon. 
There is, I trust, a great multitude of those who do 
not mean that the nation shall be faithless to her 
ideals. And among them there is none whose pur- 
poses are clearer or whose heart is truer than the 
man at the head of the nation. It is his chivalrous 
determination to resist the aggressions of greed, to 
put an end to the rule of the spoilers and the plun- 
derers and to give "a square deal" to the poor 
man, as well as the rich man, which has won for 
our President the love of the people. 

This is the kind of leadership which the nation 
must follow from this time forward. It must not 
sell its brithright for gold. It must be, in spirit and 
purpose and character, a Christian nation. It must 

[137] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

incarnate the life of Christ in its national life. It 
must therefore identify itself with the great masses 
of the common people. It must make them know 
and feel that it is their country, that their homes 
are its care, that their welfare is its pride. It must 
be able to claim the Messianic royalty; it must 
stand upon the shore of either sea, lifting up this 
standard and saying, "Behold my divine anoint- 
ing: I have a right to rule because I free the slave, 
I lift up the lowly, I protect the poor." 

And now what shall we say of the church ? Is it 
worthy to bear the Christian name ? Is it able to 
say of itself what its Master said of Himself: " The 
Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath an- 
ointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He 
hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives 
and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty 
them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable 
year of the Lord ? " Can it confidently quote these 
words and then call attention to its own life, say- 
ing to the multitudes outside its gates, " In these 
days is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears ? " Is it 
true of the church that this is the characteristic of 
its life and mission — the outstanding fact of its 

[ 138 ] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

history — that it identifies itself with the lowly, 
and the needy; that it stands forth as the friend of 
the weak and the poor and the friendless; that by 
virtue of its character and work it keeps the hold 
upon the common people which its Master always 
had? 

I do not think that any sweeping answer can be 
given to these questions. If we speak of the church 
of history, its record, on these counts, though not 
faultless, is fair and bright. Its ministries to the 
poor and the lowly through all the ages have been 
large and bountiful; it has broken the fetters of the 
slave; it has been the helper of the weak and 
helpless. 

Here, too, in using the past tense, I am not im- 
plying that no such signs are to be seen in the pres- 
ent, but I am suggesting, as before, the query 
whether the church, like the nation, is living up 
to its ideals. Is there any failure at this point in 
the church of to-day — in our Congregational 
churches ? 

I fear that we must confess that there is failure 
here. I will not say that we have lost our hold on 
those whom Christ made His closest friends, but 

[139] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

our hold is greatly weakened. Our Congregational 
churches are not, as a rule, the churches of the 
common people. My own church is not, and it is a 
grief and shame to me that it is not. We can bring 
under our care a certain number of the very poor, 
those who are more or less thriftless and who find 
the friendship of the church profitable to them- 
selves; and these are by no means to be despised or 
rejected; we may be able to help and save some of 
them — to save them from the bottomless pit of 
mendicancy, and this is well worth doing; but the 
class above these — the honest self-supporting, 
common people — we get very few of them. Many 
of them are in the Roman Catholic church; that 
church has the right to call itself Christian, so far 
as identification with the common people can give 
the right; and some of our Protestant churches in 
the cities, and more of them in the villages, succeed 
in gathering in some of them, but, so far as our 
Congregationalism is concerned, most of our 
strong churches, our leading churches, have but 
slight relations with the toiling classes. One of our 
most thoughtful pastors said to me the other day, 
"The Congregational church, as a rule, is the 

[140] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

church of the employers." It is not a rule to which 
there are no exceptions; the church of the minister 
who made the remark is an exception, and there 
are others; but your experience will confirm it as a 
general truth. Nor is Congregationalism alone in 
this condemnation; other denominations share it. 

You will remember that in the London Interna- 
tional Council of 1891, an honoured Congrega- 
tional leader maintained that Congregationalism 
was, by its traditions and tendencies, the church of 
the intelligent and the well-to-do; that we should 
recognize that fact and adjust our work to it. 
Against that proposition there were some warm 
protests; nevertheless it indicates a fact, and it is a 
fact in which we should not glory. 

I fear that it must be said of the Protestant 
churches generally, that they have been becoming, 
more and more, the churches of the employers, and 
those industrially and socially affiliated with them, 
and less and less the churches of the plain people 
who work with their hands. I have been loth to 
believe this — in fact, I have more than once disput- 
ed it; but the truth has been forced upon me. It is a 
fact which cannot be denied, which must be faced. 

[141] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

What does it mean ? What shall we say about it ? 
.What can we say but this, that it indicates some 
lamentable lowering of the Christian ideals? A 
church which, for any cause whatever, is permit- 
ting itself to be separated more and more from 
the toiling millions is in danger of losing its right 
to the Christian name. It ought to be asking itself 
very earnestly whether it bears the character of its 
Master and is filled with His spirit. The tests which 
He applied to Himself, by which He insisted that 
His claims to the Messiahship should be judged, 
are the tests which the church of to-day must 
apply to itself. If the church cannot meet them, 
there is something wrong with the church. 

It may be said that the fault is with those who 
have gone out or who have not come in; that they 
are self -exiled; that bad leaders have filled them 
with suspicion and enmity. But whatever truth 
there may be in this, it is a confession of incom- 
petency. The church has no right to shield itself 
behind such a plea. When two are estranged the 
heavier blame must rest on the stronger. The pre- 
sumption is that he, with his larger knowledge, and 
ampler spiritual resources, could have overcome 

[142] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

suspicion and disarmed enmity. If such an aliena- 
tion as this has taken place the church must be 
mainly to blame for it. We have no right to admit 
that any kind of ill-will can resist the appeal of 
patient, resolute, self-sacrificing love. We ought to 
believe that the love of Christ, abiding in His peo- 
ple, is invincible. If we have failed to overcome the 
tendencies to the alienation of the common people 
from the church we have failed to use the power 
entrusted to us. 

Let us not belittle this failure. It means much to 
us, more than most of us are ready to acknowledge. 
It has weakened the church in a vital part. It has 
set in motion tendencies which, if they are not ar- 
rested, will end in degeneration and decay. Some- 
thing may survive but it will not be the church for 
which Jesus Christ gave His life. 

Consider, for a moment, what will happen, if 
tendencies now at work are not arrested. The day 
is not far distant when the church will be the rep- 
resentative of the wealthy and well-to-do people, 
and of those affiliated with them; of the mer- 
chants, the manufacturers, the professional peo- 
ple, the teachers, the salaried men and women; 

[143] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

and when the mechanics, the operatives, the hand- 
workers in general, and the common labourers will 
be practically outside of it. Is that a result which 
any one can contemplate with equanimity ? Would 
not the doom of the church be registered in such a 
condition as that? What must be the relation of 
Jesus Christ to a church which is suffering itself 
to drift into that condition, or anything approxi- 
mating to it ? 

The church and the nation are thus together 
confronting a serious question. It is the question 
whether they are in danger of losing the right to 
bear the Christian name. It is the question 
whether the character of each is passing through a 
transformation which tends to make it something 
quite other than once it was. 

It should not be necessary to prove that the 
Christian church cannot expect to live and flourish 
when it ceases to represent in its character and life 
that which was essential in the character and life 
of Christ. 

There may be some question as to whether the 
nation is in equal peril from the same cause. It 
may be said that the nation makes no profession of 

[144] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

faith and cannot be punished for apostasy. But 
this is not a question of profession. It is a question 
of lif e and death. There is a way of lif e for nations, 
as for men, and that is the Christian way. Mr. 
Kidd, in a great historic generalization, points it 
out, in philosophic terms. There is a "cosmic 
process," he tells us, "which is everywhere tri- 
umphant in human history. There has been no 
suspension of it. There has been no tendency of 
suspension." What is this process ? It is " the eman- 
cipation and the raising of the lower classes of the 
people." Now there is no compulsion by which a 
nation can be forced to organize its life in harmony 
with this process. Some nations, Russia, for exam- 
ple, have obstinately refused to do so. But cosmic 
processes do not halt or turn aside for the greatest 
nations; the nations go down before them, as Rus- 
sia is going down to-day. The United States did 
organize its life in harmony with this process, of 
which Jesus Christ is the concrete embodiment, 
and incarnation. If it swerves from this high ideal, 
if it suffers itself to become careless of the interests 
of those with whom He identified Himself, the cos- 
mic process will go on. For though the kings of 

[145] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

finance set themselves, and the trusts and the 
grafters take counsel together against the Lord 
and against His anointed, saying, " Let us break 
their bands asunder and cast away their cords 
from us, He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, 
the Lord shall have them in derision." When 
any nation suffers its power to fall into the hands 
of those who plunder the poor for their enrich- 
ment, the ominous fingers will be seen writing 
upon the wall, "Thou art weighed and found 
wanting." 

It cannot, of course, be conceived that the 
church should emerge unharmed from the wreck 
of the nation. The life of the two is indissolubly 
joined together. The church is the soul of the na- 
tion, if the nation has a soul. The nation's faith- 
lessness is proof and consequence of the church's 
infidelity. If the church were alive with the life of 
Christ neither the church nor the nation could 
perish. 

Therefore there comes to-day a mighty call to 
the church to save the life of the nation in saving 
its own life. Of the seriousness of this juncture 
there can be no question. I am content to be called 

[146] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

an alarmist, if you will. There are times when the 
watchman must blow the trumpet and warn the 
people. I believe that my habit is sufficiently opti- 
mistic, but optimism is treachery. It is not well 
with the church, this day; it is ill with the church. 
Her grip is loosening, her energies are flagging; 
there is a perceptible slackening in her progress. 
Something is wrong and every thoughtful man 
knows it. 

Something is wrong with our evangelism. What 
is it ? Is it the Higher Criticism and the New The- 
ology? Read Dr. Brown's sober, searching, can- 
did review of the Chapman meetings in Oakland. 
All the churches, of every name, co-operated most 
cordially; these churches were crowded — with 
church members — every day for weeks; the the- 
ology of all the preaching was above suspicion : the 
Higher Criticism was put to shame, and sociology 
was not so much as mentioned; but the great out- 
side multitude, the multitude of the unchurched, 
was practically untouched. This is the testimony. 

Is it the newer thinking that is needed ? Well, we 
had that, in its most persuasive and attractive form, 
in Columbus, just before Easter; when Dr. Ab- 

[147] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

bott in a series of the most luminous sermons, set 
forth the truth as it is in Jesus so clearly and win- 
ningly that it seemed as if no rational man could 
resist the appeal: and though the church was 
crowded every night to the doors, there was but 
slight response to the call for enlistment. 

Something is wrong here. This great society, 
with its magnificent record behind it, with a strong- 
hold upon the affections of Congregationalists, 
with great obligations upon it and great opportun- 
ities before it, finds itself confronting a crisis in its 
history, crippled by its debt, doubtful of its re- 
sources, and anxiously challenging the future. In 
other societies there is solicitude and uncertainty. 

What does it all mean ? I believe, my brethren, 
that we have seen, this evening, something of what 
it means. The church has so far forgotten its essen- 
tial character, that it has lost no small measure of 
its power. Its alliance is mainly with the prosper- 
ous. Its hopes are centred upon the strong and the 
influential. I do not say that it has wholly lost its 
interest in the poor; that is nowhere true; but that 
interest has ceased to be, in too many cases, the 
central and commanding interest. It is not an 

[148] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

apostate church; God forbid that I should say any 
such thing; but it is a church of whom He that 
holdeth the seven stars in His right hand is saying : 
" I know thy works, and thy toil and thy patience : 
. . . nevertheless I have this against thee that 
thou didst leave thy first love." Thy first love — 
the love that thou didst learn at the feet of the 
Master — the love of the humblest and the need- 
iest. They are not to thee what they were to Him; 
thou canst not say what He said, " The spirit of 
the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed 
Me to preach the Gospel to the poor." Therefore 
it is that when thou goest forth with the good tid- 
ings there is a deepening and widening gulf be- 
twixt thee and those to whom thou art sent : there- 
fore it is that thy high enthusiasms are chilled and 
the pulses of thy life beat feebly, and thy treasuries 
are empty, and thy heart is filled with fear. Thou 
hast been looking for help to the prosperous and 
the powerful: thou hast forgotten whence thy 
strength must come. 

O Daughter of my people, that thou mightest 
know, in this thy day, the things that belong to thy 
peace, before they are hidden from thine eyes! 

[149] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

For it is He who is the incarnation of the Eternal 
Wisdom who is calling unto thee, " Whoso findeth 
Me findeth life," and thou knowest where to 
search for Him; with what sort of people He is 
always identified; in what company He may be 
found. 

This is the message for the churches, for all the 
churches. It is their life that needs to be replen- 
ished; when they have found Him, there will be 
resources enough for all their work. Brethren, I 
take this word home to myself, the reproach of it, 
the shame of it. I know that this is what my church 
needs more than anything else — a closer identi- 
fication with the life of the common people. It has 
lain heavily on my heart many days, and I have 
been seeking for ways of bridging the chasm which 
separates us from those who would, we know, be 
Christ's closest friends if He were here. I am per- 
suaded that this is the one great need of all our 
churches, to break down the barriers that separate 
us from them, to overcome their suspicions and 
their fears, to make them believe that we love 
them, that their interests are dear to us, that the 
brotherhood of man is not to us a phrase, but the 

[150] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

central fact of our lives. I do not believe that our 
evangelism will accomplish anything until we can 
solve this problem; when it is solved, a flame of 
sacred love will be kindled that will run like prairie 
fire all over the land. 

It is your message, too, brethren of this society 
— yours, no less than ours, yours because it is 
ours. On the frontiers, in the hamlets, in the 
swarming, polyglot populations of the cities, you 
must make friends with the poor. They are your 
strongest allies. Win their love and all is well with 
you. You may get the co-operation of all the pluto- 
crats in the country and it will do you no perma- 
nent good; your treasury will be quickly drained 
and your debts will accumulate, but if you can 
make the poor people, the common people, be- 
lieve in you and love you, your cruse will not fail 
nor will your springs run dry. The Lord must love 
the poor people, the common people, said Mr. Lin- 
coln, for he has made so many of them. He does 
love them; they are very near to Him; and it is 
therefore well worth while to have them for our 
friends. 

The cities, the great industrial centres, the min- 

[151] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

ing districts, are full of these people who are out- 
side the churches — and who, though most of 
them are not in want, and need no charity, are, in a 
spiritual sense, " distressed and scattered, as sheep 
having no shepherd." It was to such as these that 
the heart of the Master went out in compassion; it 
is to them that we must go. 

You say that you have been trying to reach 
them; yes, we have all been trying — about half 
trying; but we have not put into our endeavour the 
passion of consecrated purpose which a Christly 
love would inspire. 

I am persuaded that this is the underlying rea- 
son of all our embarrassments and perplexities, as 
a society. There may have been errors of policy, 
faults of management, but the conditions that dis- 
turb us to-day have a deeper origin; they will not 
be cured by any new adjustments of machinery. 
They spring from a cooling enthusiasm, a waning 
love in the hearts of the people of our churches. 
We are out of touch with the sources of our power. 
We have lost the Messianic fire. It will never be 
rekindled until with all our hearts we return to 
Him who said, " The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me 

[152] 



THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

because He hath anointed Me to preach good tid- 
ings to the poor," — and who, under the shadow 
of Gethsemane, prayed : " As Thou didst sent Me 
into the world, even so sent I them into the world." 
If all this is true, doubtless it will call on us all 
for some deep searchings of heart, some changes in 
our methods of work, some new alignment of our 
forces, some simplification of our lives, some 
broadening of our friendships to include many 
with whom we have had, hitherto, but little in 
common. But all these sacrifices will bring their 
own compensation. And I trust that to some of us, 
at least, there may appear a vision of what the 
church of Jesus Christ might be, in this day and 
generation, if she would gather into herself the re- 
sources that belong to her — even the weak and 
despised things — the things that God hath 
chosen — and thus replenished and equipped 
would go forth to do battle for her Lord. To such a 
church there could come no dream of defeat, no 
fear of failure; the Kingdom and the greatness of 
the Kingdom under the whole heaven would be 
hers, and in the name of her Lord she would enter 
in and take possession. 

[153] 



Religion and Democracy 



1 HE opinion is not new that religion holds a 
vital relation to good government. The Hebrew 
Scriptures make this truth central, as in the words 
which I have just read, but it is not peculiar to 
them. 

"A city," says Plutarch, "might more easily 
be founded without territory than a state without 
belief in God." Memorable, also, are the first 
words of Plato's great work upon " The Laws. " 
They are spoken in dialogue by three men who are 
walking in Crete on a summer day to the cave and 
temple of Zeus, 

Athenian. — Tell me, Stranger, is God or a man sup- 
posed to be the author of your laws ? 

Cleinias. — God, Stranger; in the truest sense they 
may be said to be the work of God; among us Cretans 
the Author of them has been supposed to be Zeus; but in 
Lacedsemon, as our Lacedaemonian friend will tell you, 
they say that Apollo is their lawgiver. 

[157] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

Athenian. — And do you believe, as Homer says, that 
Minos went, every ninth year, to converse with his 
Athenian sire, and made laws for your cities in accord- 
ance with his sacred words ? 

Cleinias. — Yes, that is our tradition. 

In " The Republic, " also, it will be remembered 
that Plato, while mercilessly wielding the scalpel of 
the higher criticism upon the Homeric tales, yet 
strongly maintains that the true knowledge of the 
true God is an essential element in the education 
by which the citizen is prepared for the service of 
the State. 

Whatever may be the form of the State, there- 
fore, it has long been assumed that religion lies at 
its foundation. "The powers that be," says 
Paul, " are ordained of God : there is no power but 
of God." That was announced as the Christian 
doctrine of government in the days when Nero 
was Emperor at Rome. 

"Man," said Aristotle, "is a political animal." 
The instincts with which he is endowed create po- 
litical society, and establish some measure of order 
and subordination. In responding to these natu- 
ral impulses he is, in some dim way, obeying his 

[158] 



RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY 

Creator and there is, therefore, a religious element 
in the rudest and worst forms of human govern- 
ment. "The powers that be," whatever they 
may be, so long as they stand for order and law, do 
represent that Eternal Reason who is the source of 
order and law. 

According to the philosophy of Paul and of Aris- 
totle, religion is, therefore, a vital element in all 
forms of government. If democracy is a mode 
of government, if it secures a coherent social order, 
it must do so by making use of those instincts and 
tendencies of human nature by which men are 
drawn into political relations. Democracy can no 
more dispense with the divinely implanted social 
tendencies than the builder can dispense with 
gravitation and cohesion. 

It is true that there have been theories of politi- 
cal society in which these deep-lying principles of 
human nature are scarcely recognized. The social 
contract theory, of which Rousseau is chief sponsor, 
seems to find in the individual human will the es- 
sential elements of government. According to this 
theory men do not live in political society because 
"it is their nature to," but because they have 

[159] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
made up their minds that it is expedient to do so; 
and government is a kind of pool to which each 
one contributes a part of his selfhood. Whatever 
just power it possesses is the aggregate of these in- 
dividual volitional contributions of authority. 
Rousseau does not deny that God is over all, but he 
is so far above us that we cannot be partners with 
Him in the business of government; we must gov- 
ern ourselves. " All justice comes from God, " he 
says ; " He alone is its source ; but if we knew how to 
receive it from so exalted a source we would need 
neither government nor law. " Because we do not 
know how to receive it from so exalted a source we 
must fashion it for ourselves. It is purely a manu- 
factured article; man made it, and is responsible 
for it; of course, he has a right to destroy the work 
of his hands when it so pleases him. 
Says Bluntschli: 

The main error [of this theory] lies in representing 
individuals as contracting. If individuals make con- 
tracts, private rights are created but not public rights. 
What belongs to the individual as such is his private 
property, his individual possession. With that he can 
deal; one like another can make contracts about it. But 
contracts cannot have a political character unless there 

[160] 



RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY 

is already a community above the individuals; for a con- 
tract, if political, does not deal with the private good of 
individuals, but with the public good of the community. 

Thus neither a nation nor a state can arise out of con- 
tract between individuals. A sum of individual wills does 
not produce a common will. The renunciation of any 
number of private rights does not produce any public 
right. 

For practical politics this doctrine is in the highest 
degree dangerous, since it makes the state and its insti- 
tutions the product of individual caprice and declares it 
to be changeable according to the will of the individuals 
then living. It destroys the conception of public law, in- 
stigates the citizens to unconstitutional movements, 
and exposes the state to the uttermost insecurity and 
confusion. It is to be considered, therefore, a theory of 
anarchy rather than a political doctrine. 

It is thus evident that a purely man-made gov- 
ernment, whether it be monarchy or democracy, 
lacks the principle of unity and permanence. 
Something deeper and stronger than the human 
will must hold the state together, or it will soon fall 
into fragments. We have had something too much 
of this atomistic philosophy in all our national 
politics. While it was not the impelling cause of the 
secession of the Southern States, it furnished the 
logical justification for that secession. It cost this 

[ 161 ] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

nation a million lives and several billions of treas- 
ure to stamp it out. The expenditure was not ex- 
travagant if only we have learned that the bond of 
a nation's life is something stronger than the con- 
senting wills of its individual citizens. 

The recognition of this deeper relationship is 
essential to the welfare of all forms of political so- 
ciety, but more imperative in a democracy than in 
any other form of the state. Under a monarchy the 
unity of the people is symbolized by a hereditary 
dynasty; in a republic there is no such visible sign 
of the bond that holds together the generations. 
The King of England represents to all his sub- 
jects a thousand years of history : the blood of Al- 
fred and the Saxons, of William and the Normans, 
of Plantagenet and Tudor and Stuart and Hano- 
verian is flowing in his veins. The nation ovei 
which he rules is the same nation that was ruled 
by Edward the Confessor and all the Edwards, by 
Henry Beauclerc and all the Henrys ; it is the Eng- 
land of Crecy and Poictiers and Trafalgar and 
Waterloo, and the king is a living witness to its 
unity. No wonder that his personality is a spell to 
conjure with; loyalty to him is a kind of religion. 

[162] 



RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY 

In a democracy such symbols are absent, and 
there is all the more need of the recognition of the 
deeper and more sacred bond which binds all 
peoples together. For that bond exists : it is the fun- 
damental fact of our national lif e, and we ought to 
own it and rejoice in it. We have not in America 
the living emblem of our unity, but we have the 
spiritual fact, and it is needful that we should get 
acquainted with that. There is no hereditary dynas- 
ty to which our loyalty may cling, but there is an in- 
ner principle of unity — a law written upon the heart 
of the nation whose authority we must neither gain- 
say nor ignore. For Elisha Mulf ord's words are true : 

The origin of the nation is not in the will of the indi- 
vidual, nor in the will of the whole, but in the higher will 
without which the whole can have no being, and its con- 
tinuity is not in the changing interest of men, but in the 
vocation which in a widening purpose from the fathers 
to the children joins the generations of men, and its unity 
is not in the concurrent choice of a certain number of 
men, but in the divine purpose in history which brings to 
one end the unnumbered deeds of unnumbered men. 

The evolutionary philosophy enables us to 
grasp and hold, as never before, the truth of the 
divine immanence. The fact that God is in His 

[163] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

world is becoming credible to many thoughtful 
men; the vast significance which is thus given to 
the whole of nature and lif e we are beginning dimly 
to discern. But the truth that the constructive 
elements of political society are divine elements : 
that the social order not less than the natural or- 
der is the outworking of the divine purpose ; that in 
the state, as well as in the plant, there is a stream 
of tendency by which it strives to fulfil the law of 
its being — this is a truth of which we have not, 
as yet, made much account. Our doctrine of po- 
litical society is largely deistical. Its God is 
wholly external to the machine — one who, in 
Carlyle's phrase, having wound up the universe, 
contents Himself with sitting on the outside and 
seeing it go. That He has any practical or vital re- 
lation to the affairs of human government is not 
conceived by many Americans. 

The monarch is apt at least to feign that he 
reigns by the will of God. With some of them no 
doubt it is more than feigning; the Emperor of 
Germany, erratic as his conduct often seems, is 
clearly possessed by the conviction that he has no 
power that does not come to him from God, and 

[164] 



RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY 
that his business is to know God's will and do it. 
The only difficulty in his case is a misgiving which 
may trouble us, that the organ of revelation may 
be defective; that there may be error on his part in 
discerning the will of God; that the royal inter- 
preter of the divine decrees may some time see, as 
in a blurred mirror, dimly, the purposes of the 
Most High. That difficulty always exists, under all 
forms of government. Moses made mistakes — 
serious and fatal ones — and so did Samuel and 
David, — inspired interpreters though they were 
supposed to be, of the divine will. We have no war- 
rant for believing that any individual monarch or 
law giver will be infallible. Yet it is the right thing 
for every man on whom such responsibility falls to 
recognize the Source of all sovereignty and righ- 
teous rule, and to seek to know His will and to con- 
form to it. The Emperor of Germany is perfectly 
right in his theory, and while he may often blunder 
sadly in his attempts to re-enact and enforce the 
law of God, yet there is more hope for the gov- 
ernment of a monarch who is actuated by this sin- 
cere purpose than for that of a republic which has 
no sense of any divine vocation, and which as- 

[165] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

sumes that there is no authority save that which re- 
sides in individual human wills, and in such com- 
pacts as they may choose to form. The people, like 
the monarch, may err in their interpretation of the 
will of God ; but it is woe to them if they do not seek 
to know it. For a devout monarchy there is some 
hope; for an atheistic democracy there is none. 

Is it fair to speak of American democracy as 
atheistic? No loyal American would make any 
such accusation. In their origin our institutions 
were fundamentally religious; the colonies, is 
many cases, were theocracies, rather than democ- 
racies. Nor has the idea of some divine supervision 
of our affairs ever wholly forsaken the thoughts of 
the people. But the conception of the relation of 
God to the concerns of the state has probably been 
that of occasional or frequent interpositions to re- 
ward us for our good deeds or to punish for our 
transgressions. The business of government, like 
the greater part of our concerns, has been regard- 
ed as belonging in the secular realm; and the secu- 
lar realm is under the operation of natural law, 
that is the law of competition, the law of the 
strongest. Authority is derived from human voli- 

[166] 



RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY 

tion, and where human wills do not agree, they 
must be counted, and the authority given to the 
majority. This is the working theory of our de- 
mocracy; we do not, in practice, look beyond the 
will of the individual voter; we assume that he is 
the final depository of power. " Governments," we 
say, " derive their just powers from the consent of 
the governed." This is our practical interpretation 
of political sovereignty and political obligation. 
We are not theoretical atheists, but there is not 
much room for God in our politics any more than 
in our business. Indeed the prevalent notion is that 
politics and religion are separate realms, and that 
it is not only unseemly but positively mischievous 
to try to unite them. For any abiding sense of the 
presence of God in our political life, or of the need 
of knowing his will and working with him, we 
search in vain through current politics. There is, 
therefore, we must sorrowfully confess, a great deal 
of practical atheism in the prevailing conceptions 
of the American people respecting their political 
affairs. Evidence of this may be seen, 

1. In the emphasis placed upon the suffrage 
and citizenship as a right rather than a duty. That 

[167] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

is the idea which is always uppermost in all our 
political discussions. The suffrage is called the 
elective franchise — and the thought is always 
fixed upon it as a personal possession, or privilege. 
What is mine by right I may use as I please; 
if I fail to use it, it is nobody's concern but 
mine; I may dispose of it for my own advantage; 
it is not far to the conclusion that I may sell it, 
if there is a market. Precisely the same thing 
is true, of course, of official functions. The right 
to hold office is easily interpreted as the right 
to use the power which the office gives me for 
my own emolument. The emphasis placed upon 
citizenship as a right thus leads by a straight 
path to the corruption and bribery by which 
our governments of all grades are now so sadly 
vitiated. 

The entire conception is fundamentally defec- 
tive, and it arises, as will be seen at once, from the 
failure to recognize the divine agency in the struc- 
ture of the state. If God is the real Ruler of all na- 
tions, if the first principle of political wisdom is to 
find out His will and do it, then the suffrage is not 
primarily a right, but a duty, and citizenship is not 

[168] 



RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY 

a franchise but a trust for the exercise of which I 
am directly responsible to him.* 

2. Another evidence of this practical atheism is 
the growing lack of respect for law. No one can 
deny that this is among the most dangerous ten- 
dencies of American society. The way in which 
citizens and officers alike ignore and defy the laws 
of the state or the city is a surprise to visitors from 
other countries and a grief to all good men. Is it 
not due, at least in part, to the entire seculariza- 
tion of our thought about government ? Will the 
law which derives all its authority from the consent 
of the governed, from the more or less casual 
agreement of human wills, ever be invested with 
sacredness ? 

3. The practical atheism of our politics is ex- 
hibited also in the violence and recklessness of 
partisanship. If there were any sense of the pres- 
ence of God in human affairs, men could not be 
such virulent partisans as they are — always bent 
on putting the worst possible construction upon all 
the actions of their opponents — and even deter- 
mined to prevent them from doing right, lest they 

*See the fuller discussion in a following chapter. 

[169] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

may get credit for it. If we believed that God is 
really ruling, not only in the armies of heaven, but 
also among the inhabitants of the earth, we should 
be looking for signs of His presence; and when we 
saw any wrong righted, or any movement in pro- 
gress which promised the increase of freedom or 
righteousness, or any evidence whatever that any 
man in power was endeavouring to do right, we 
should hail it and praise it, whether it originated 
in our party or the other party. We can hardly be 
so infatuated as to suppose that no signs of God's 
presence can be visible in the national life except 
when our party is in power. If He is getting His will 
done on earth, at all, it is probably done now and 
then by those who are not of our party. The pre- 
vailing disposition to disparage or denounce 
everything that is done by political opponents is a 
clear sign that there is no reverent recognition of 
the presence of God in the affairs of the nation. 

4. More grave than all else is the tendency to 
set at naught the fundamental principles of our 
democracy by permitting the strong to oppress the 
weak. No one can fail to see that here is a great 
danger. In this free country of ours have ap- 

[170] 



RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY 

peared the most stupendous aggregations of power 
known to history. That they may be able by cor- 
rupt means to pervert the government which ex- 
ists for the protection of the people, and thus to 
despoil the people for their own aggrandizement is 
certainly among the possible perils. Is not this, 
also, evidence of the failure to recognize the pres- 
ence of God in our national life ? Belief in God as 
the Father of all men, is a belief that all men are 
brothers; and the attempt of some to prosper at 
the expense of the rest is a violent denial of the 
fundamental article of the Christian religion. It 
was upon this belief that our democracy was 
founded in the beginning, and not upon any the- 
ory about a consent of individual wills. And I do 
not believe that our democracy can continue to 
exist unless this great truth of the brotherhood of 
man is restored and lifted up and emphasized as 
the constructive idea of all our civil life. The idea 
of the liberty of the individual is not a sound basis 
for a democratic government. "We cannot," says 
Professor Giddings, " begin with liberty, irrespec- 
tive of fraternity and expect that liberty will then 
develope into fraternity and equality. It is more 

[171] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
likely to develope into the widest inequality and 
burning hatreds. If, however, we first have frater- 
nity, we can also have liberty. Men who are alike 
— who have common interests, who are like- 
minded — can live together on a basis of mutual 
agreements without any coercive power above 
them to keep them in order. Men of differing na- 
tionalities and faiths, if also of discordant minds, 
can live and work together for a common purpose, 
only when a coercive power maintains order among 
them. Fraternity, then, must be antecedent to lib- 
erty and not liberty to fraternity, if liberty and 
fraternity are to coexist." 

Now it is manifest that the growth of monopoly 
is the denial of fraternity; and those who have 
ceased to believe in the brotherhood of man give 
the clearest evidence that they do not believe in 
the fatherhood of God. He that loveth not his 
brother whom he hath seen cannot believe in God 
whom he hath not seen. 

These tendencies which I have pointed out 
show us what losses a democracy suffers and to 
what dangers it exposes itself when it fails to rec- 
ognize in its practical affairs the religious truths 

[172] 



RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY 

on which its life is founded. And they also suggest 
to us by contrast what gains might come to this 
nation if only the great truths of religion were rec- 
ognized as vital elements of its life. 

What a change would pass upon all our civic life 
if through the recognition of God in the national 
life, we should come to think of citizenship and 
office-holding not as personal rights but as duties 
owed by us to God in the building up of his King- 
dom on the earth ! And what a sense of the sacred- 
ness of law would take possession of the hearts of 
the people, if legislators understood that their bus- 
iness was to discern God's purposes and shape 
their statutes, as nearly as they could, in accord- 
ance with them; and if the people felt that these 
laws were attempts to express, however imperfect- 
ly, in human words the eternal Reason ! And what 
a great peace would fall upon the stormy deep of 
partisan politics if men only felt that God is here, 
fulfilling His great purposes in the ongoings of our 
political life, even making the wrath of man to 
praise Him and using now, as He has always used, 
imperfect men to accomplish His great designs ! 
Above all, what a new sense of the essential signifi- 

[173] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

cance of democratic government would take pos- 
session of the minds of the people, if they could 
see that it is simply the logical expression of the 
doctrine of the divine Fatherhood and the human 
brotherhood; and that thus the very corner-stone 
of democracy is religion ! 

If, as Professor Giddings, so strongly says, fra- 
ternity rather than liberty is the primary fact of 
democracy, then democracy must have its basis in 
religion; for it is absurd to talk about a brother- 
hood when there is no Fatherhood. How can all 
men be brothers unless they have a common 
Father, and how can they separate their frater- 
nal love from their filial reverence? All talk 
of fraternity which denies or ignores the Eternal 
Fatherhood is cant or hypocrisy. If love is not 
the heart of the universe all such terms are mean- 
ingless. 

It is evident that the recognition of these truths 
as fundamental in governmental science would 
result in revolutionizing our customary ways of 
thinking about political affairs. And it is not less 
evident that such a radical change of thought is 
needed if democracy is to be saved from disinte- 

[174] 



RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY 

gration. The atomistic philosophy has introduced 
into our political life the seeds of dissolution; it is 
time that we were seeking for conceptions more 
constructive. 

It may be asked whether the traditional dread of 
the union of church and state is a groundless fear; 
if there is not danger here against which we should 
be on our guard. Yes, there is danger in all al- 
liances between political and ecclesiastical institu- 
tions. What might be true of the church were one I 
cannot tell, but there is no ecclesiasticism on earth 
to-day which is not a mere fragment — a sect; 
none which represents the spiritual side of the 
Kingdom of God. And it is evident that the state 
can have nothing to do with any of these contend- 
ing sects. They make for division rather than 
unity; the state cannot recognize any of these. 
It is not ecclesiasticism or sectarianism which is 
vital to the state; it is religion — the spiritual facts 
which underlie all the creeds. 

"As a mere economic formula," says Richard 
Whiteing '* democracy must ever fade off into Bel- 
lamy visions of a glorified Poughkeepsie with su- 
perior drains. The underground system of the hu- 

[175] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

man being is the thing that we must first set right. 
. . . Without religion, how is man, the essen- 
tially religious animal, to face the most tremen- 
dous of all problems — social justice ? Religion, 
Guyau's natural internal energy for all good 
coming straight from the heart of all being and 
translating itself into action by its own exuberance 
of vitality — is his breath of life. Such progress as 
he has made has ever been in accordance with such 
religion as he has had. Poor as they may have 
been, they have been adequate in their hour, and 
this science moves by experiment, like the rest. 
What is essential in it is what has least changed. 
Love, justice, brotherhood, ever the voice has 
whispered these or proclaimed them in trumpet 
tones. Only the systems are the things that have 
had their day. " 

It is my profound belief that nothing but the 
recognition of these truths, with the change of 
mind which they must bring, will save our dem- 
ocracy from decay. Some power is needed to front 
and overcome the influences which are now as- 
sailing the very foundations of the state, and which 
tend to subvert our liberties. I do not believe that 

[176] 



RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY 
any help can come from the economic motives to 
which we are wont to make appeal, or from the 
theories which make individual rights and inter- 
ests the source of social justice. There is nothing in 
all this to call forth enthusiasm or to warrant sacri- 
fice. There is nothing here worth fighting and dy- 
ing for. Something there must be in the appeal 
that the democracy makes to its citizens which is 
deeper than self-interest and diviner than the will 
of the majority. If we can believe that in the na- 
tion, not less truly than in the individual, it is God 
that worketh; that there is a Power, not ourselves, 
that makes for righteousness in the ongoings of 
the state; that there is a moral ideal toward which 
he is leading us, and which it is our business to dis- 
cern and realize; that thus, if we are humble, and 
reverent and obedient to the Light that lighteth 
every man, we may be co-workers with God in the 
building of His kingdom in the world, then there 
are motives to be drawn from the life of the state 
that are higher than mere expediency, that appeal 
to faith and imagination and self-devotion — to all 
the nobler possibilities of the soul, — and are able 
to make men heroes, patriots, martyrs for the 

[177] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

commonwealth. For such a nation, surely, some 
would even dare to die — not only on the battle- 
field, fighting against an invading enemy, but in 
the lists of civic duty resisting the far more dan- 
gerous foes that lurk within the household. 

Until reform takes on the essential characteristics 
of religion, in its recognition of a "mystery in 
the affairs of state " deeper than the consent of in- 
dividual wills, in its devotion to a moral ideal as 
supreme above all momentary choices and ma- 
terial interests, and in its willingness to sacrifice 
present gains for future well being, there can be 
no clear assurance of saving health to the nation. 



[178] 



Rights and Duties* 



* Address delivered at the Fifty-eighth Annual Commence- 
ment of the University of Michigan, June 19, 1902. 



1 SHALL assume, Mr. President and gentle- 
men of the governing board and of the faculty, 
ladies and gentlemen of the audience, that my busi- 
ness here to-day is with the members of the grad- 
uating class; that I am not here to discuss great 
questions of philosophy or jurisprudence or 
political science, whose relation to this occasion 
would be remote, but to find some word, if I 
can, which may have light and leading in it for 
these young men and women. To them, this hour 
ought to be sacred; whatever we can do to make 
it memorable and serviceable to them, we are 
bound to do. 

For myself I will confess that in thinking of the 
problems of the future, so imminent and grave; of 
the serious questions that must be settled before 
this new century is very old; of the struggles that 
must ensue; of the overturnings that are sure to 

[181] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

come; of the ideas, full of electric energy, which are 
abroad and certain to be heard from — 

For all the dark of time reveals, 
A bridal dawn of thunder peals 
Wherever thought has wedded fact, — 

in all this thinking my own mind goes quickly to 
the young men and women now growing up, those 
in the colleges and universities, those standing on 
the threshold of professional and business life; for 
it is upon them, beyond question, that the weight 
of these responsibilities is to rest. No one can so 
forecast the years as to tell just when the most seri- 
ous test of our American institutions is coming. 
But it is safe to predict that important changes are 
going to take place during the first quarter of this 
century. We are all hoping that these changes will 
be accompanied by the least possible violence and 
turmoil, but it is too much to hope that we shall 
emerge into the new order without passing through 
some anxious and perilous days. By our neglect 
and indifference we have been permitting great in- 
justices to intrench themselves; these cannot en- 
dure, and they will not be dislodged without con- 
flict and suffering. The brunt of this battle is likely 

[182] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

to be borne by the young people who are now get- 
ting their training for life. My eyes never rest on a 
company of these young men and women, that my 
heart does not begin to beat more quickly, and my 
thoughts to travel forth into those stirring times in 
which their manhood and womanhood will be 
tested. It is the merest commonplace to say that 
the future rests with them. The answer to many of 
these anxious questions now looming on our social 
horizon will be spoken by them. A great work of 
reconstruction, social, industrial, political, eccle- 
siastical, has got to be done, and the forces by 
which this work is to be wrought will be found in 
the minds, the hearts and the lives of these young 
men and women. The ruling ideas by which their 
lives are controlled will find expression in the civil- 
ization which will occupy the earth in the next half 
century. How great, therefore, is the need that 
these ideas should be right ideas; that they should 
learn to see things as they are, to get values into 
their right perspective, to know how to live. 

The great need, of course, is wisdom. * Wisdom 
is the principal thing," said one wise man, "there- 
fore get wisdom." Wisdom is more than knowing, 

[183] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
it is knowing how. It is the practical quality. My 
old college president, Mark Hopkins, who was one 
of the wisest men I ever knew, defined wisdom as 
the choice of the right ends and of the right means 
to attain those ends. The wise man is one who 
knows what is worth having and how to get it; 
what is worth doing and how to do it; what to aim 
at and how to hit it. The application of this prin- 
ciple to life as a whole, and to the various labours 
and enterprises of which life is made up, is what 
we need most of all to learn. 

What, then, is the end of our existence ? It may 
seem a very simple answer, a sort of identical prop- 
osition, but it is true to say that our business in life 
is to live. We are here to live; we have no other call- 
ing. Not to vegetate, but to live; not merely to ex- 
ercise our animal functions, but to live; to live as 
men; to fulfil and complete our manhood; to real- 
ize what is implied in the powers and possibilities 
of our own nature — that is the end of life. There 
is an old hymn which affirms that 

9 Tis not the whole of life to live, 

but to say that is to put a low and inadequate 

[184] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

meaning into the infinitive "to live." If it is meant 
that the whole of life is not contained in the nar- 
row space between the cradle and the grave we 
may assent; but when we have begun to under- 
stand what it means to live, we shall clearly see 
that nothing larger or higher or finer or nobler is 
possible to us that just living. Living, for a man, 
implies knowing and enjoying, and loving and do- 
ing. It connotes a mind that is alive, and sensibil- 
ities that are alive, and affections that are alive 
and a will that is alive; a whole man, vital in every 
part, each faculty fulfilling its function. 

"The evident end of any being," says a phil- 
osopher, "is to be, according to the nature given 
unto him. If the rose does not blossom, if the bee 
does not fly and gather honey, we say they have 
not fulfilled their destinies. If, then, the being be a 
rational and moral being, it evidently has a more 
elevated end — that end which its fuller intelli- 
gence discerns and the higher constitution of its 
nature points to. This end is the amplest, loftiest 
development of which its nature is possible." 

The most brilliant of the recent French philos- 
ophers, Jean Marie Guyau, has enforced this idea 

[185] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

with more cogency of statement than any recent 
writer; to him life itself is the supreme good; it in- 
cludes in itself the ethical imperative; to live in the 
largest and completest sense of the word is man's 
chief end. " If," says Royce, paraphrasing Guyau, 
" the single instinct, now become a conscious de- 
sire, wars with the whole of life, our interest in 
life's wholeness now consciously demands that the 
rebellious special desire be subordinated, that our 
wants take on the form of wholeness, that life be 
harmonized, and that the desire for more life, for 
more harmonious, extended, and intense life be- 
come the law of our being, ruling our special de- 
sires, putting them down if need be, giving life a 
plan, fulfilling the end of the Self in its wholeness." 
This is not, to be sure, any novelty of doctrine. 
More than two-thirds of a century ago Tennyson 
was singing — 

'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, 
O life, not death, for which we pant, 
More life and fuller that we want. 

And it is almost two millenniums, since an old 
man was writing to a young man, showing him 
how to "lay hold on the life which is life indeed." 

[186] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

But, as Guyau has so convincingly shown us, life 
is far from being an individual possession. Even 
man himself is not a monad. "Individual con- 
sciousness is a compound of all the cells that are 
united in the physical organism;" it is "a We 
rather than an /," as Espinas would say. As a tree 
is not an individual, but a republic rather, thou- 
sands of individual lives co-ordinated in a com- 
munity, each bud being an individual life, so man 
is in himself a society, a combined group of living 
cells united in a common consciousness. But this is 
only the beginning of interdependencies and co- 
operations. For this human personality, whom we 
wrongly name an individual, finds its life only in 
vital union with other lives. To live is not to sepa- 
rate ourselves from our fellows, but to unite with 
them in multiform ministries of giving and receiv- 
ing. We are parts of a whole, and can no more con- 
sider our interests separately from the rest, than 
one of the wheels of a watch or one of the links of a 
chain can set up a separate interest and figure out 
its rights and liberties and possessions without ref- 
erence to the other wheels and the other links. 
" One cannot," says Professor Royce, " first live for 

[187] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

himself and then for others. To live his own life is 
to recognize his organic relationship to his fellows. 
My desire to love is as much a part of my own in- 
ner life interest as is my desire to eat. If I want to 
live largely, intensely, and in unity I want to live a 
life that cannot be conceived alone. I want to love 
largely, intensely, harmoniously." 

If living is our business in this world, we shall be 
compelled, then, to recognize the fact that our life 
is primarily and constantly a life in relations. It is 
achieved only when these relations are discerned 
and fulfilled. It is no more possible to live separate 
from our kind than it is for the plant to live iso- 
lated from soil and air and sun. 

" The bee," says Maeterlinck, " is above all, and 
even to a greater extent than the ant, a creature of 
the crowd. She can live only in the midst of a mul- 
titude. When she leaves the hive, which is so 
densely packed that she has to force her way with 
blows of the head through the living walls that en- 
close her, she departs from her proper element. 
She will dive for an instant into flower-filled space, 
as the swimmer will dive into the sea that is filled 
with pearls, but under pain of death it behooves 

[188] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 
her at regular intervals to return and breathe the 
crowd, as the swimmer must return and breathe 
the air. Isolate her, and however abundant the 
food or favourable the temperature, she will expire 
in a few days, not of hunger or cold but of loneli- 
ness." In man, personality has had a more com- 
plete development; independent life and action is 
with him a larger factor than with the bee; he 
might maintain his physical life for years in soli- 
tude; but all that is significant and distinctive of 
manhood would drop away if he were isolated; 
speech would be lost, thought would be paralysed, 
love would be atrophied; even if the race could be 
propagated by some autochthonous method, all 
that we now understand by the life of a man would 
disappear with the rupture of the social bond. 

We are not, however, autochthons; the fact of 
parentage confronts us on the threshold of life; 
there is a society of three at any rate — father, 
mother, child — involved in the existence of every 
one of us. And this small natural group to which, 
in the narrower sense, our life is due, is bound no 
less really, if somewhat less obviously, to the en- 
tire social order in the midst of which we live.This 

[189] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
organic relation of parts to the whole and of the 
whole to the parts is the fundamental fact of our 
lives. You cannot understand your own life, you 
cannot think about yourself or about anything else 
rightly, you cannot normally exercise the feelings 
and sentiments which are part of our human na- 
ture, you cannot make any right plans of living, 
save as you fully accept, as an integral part of your 
life, this fact of your organic and vital relation to 
your fellow-men. 

" If I want just to live, for life's sake " — thus 
Professor Royce interprets Guyau, "I can no 
longer separate my own from the common life. 
The richest interior life, as for instance the life of 
thought, is at the same time the life that is most 
obviously social. I cannot think alone. I can only 
think with others. If I want to live the thinker's 
life I must then make it part of my aim that there 
should be other thinkers in the world, my equals, 
whose ideas are as valuable to me as my own, and 
whose mental advantage is as much a part of my 
goal as my own intellectual growth. All communi- 
cation is social; if you will, altruistic. It is done for 
the sake of those to whom I speak. But it is also 

[190] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

done for my own sake, since utterly uncommunica- 
tive thought quickly comes to mean nothing. Thus 
life and action exist only through their fecundity. 
Mere egoism is self-mutilation. Life is expansive, 
goes beyond itself, lives in social relations, is best 
for me within when it is best expressed for those 
without." 

If you question this, ask your biologists. They 
will tell you that the very principle of life is expan- 
sion; that the primal cell divides to multiply and 
multiplies by division. The more intense is the life 
the stronger is its tendency to expand and find its 
fulfilment in other lives. 

Our business is life, and we live in relations; we 
are parts of a whole to which we are vitally and 
organically related. Each has a function to fulfil, 
„ and we behave as moral beings when each dis- 
cerns the function which belongs to him and by his 
free choice seeks to perform it. When functions are 
performed by moral beings we call them duties. 
And the simple but momentous truth which 
emerges from this analysis is that the fundamental 
fact of our social and civic life is duty. The one 
thing needful to healthful social life is that each 

[191] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
one should play his part, fulfil his function, do his 
duty. It is when this fact is kept uppermost in all 
our thinking, our teaching, our contriving, our 
working, that the conditions are fulfilled on which 
our social welfare rests. If any other thought is 
emphasized more than this in our political and 
social theories, if any other idea takes precedence 
of this, there will be trouble and confusion, sooner 
or later; for it is our ruling ideas which make or 
mar our social structure. If we want to live to- 
gether peacefully, usefully, productively, we must 
recognize and respect and obey the law of life 
which is service, ministry, helpfulness. This is the 
one thing which our children should be taught — 
the one principle which should be central and fun- 
damental in their training. In the family they must 
never lose sight of the fact that each has a part to 
perform, a contribution to make; that the happy 
life of the household is the result of the fulfilment 
by every member of the household of the function 
which belongs to him. When they go out into the 
larger social relations they must learn that the 
same law governs them ; that the question of ques- 
tions for every man in every association to which 

[192] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

he belongs, in every position which he occupies is 
how he may do his part, how he may render the 
service which is due from him, then and there, to 
those who are round about him. Especially true is 
this of all our civic and political relations. The one 
word which describes the lif e of a citizen is duty ; 
the one principle which governs his life, if he is a 
good citizen, is devotion to duty. Something is due 
from every man to the community in which he 
lives, to the state or the nation to which he be- 
longs; to understand what is due from him, and to 
render what is due from him, is the supreme wish, 
the controlling aim, the ruling passion of the good 
citizen. His entire relation to the commonwealth is 
defined, to his own thought, in terms of duty. He 
knows that the commonwealth is a living organ- 
ism, and that it lives, as the body lives, when each 
member fulfils his function; that the paramount 
question for every man must therefore be whether 
he is doing the part that belongs to him as a mem- 
ber of the civil or political body to which he 
belongs. 

It is evident that any political society in which 
this principle was made regnant through the hab- 

[193] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
itual thought and action of its citizens would be 
the abode of order and peace and universal wel- 
fare. We should see in it a social organism con- 
forming to its law, living as a social organism 
should live, living healthily, therefore, and pros- 
perously, with no formidable foes to fight, and no 
abuses to chastise, and no parasites to extermi- 
nate; a community in which crime and pauperism 
were accidents and in which political jobbery and 
misfeasance were practically unknown. 

We are not acquainted with any such commun- 
ity. And the fact on which I desire now to fasten 
your attention is that we are not acquainted with 
any community in which the principle that we are 
considering is even recognized as the regnant prin- 
ciple of the life of the commonwealth. There is no 
political society in which I have ever happened to 
live in which duty is regarded as the constructive 
idea. When men and women, American men and 
women, think about their relation to political soci- 
ety, the idea to which their minds go most directly 
is not duty, but something very different. I do not 
mean to say that they never think about their duty 
to the commonwealth; most of them would recog- 

[194] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

nize some measure of obligation; but I mean that 
this idea is not the one which is central and regu- 
lative in their conception of their political relations. 
It is of their political rights that they think first and 
oftenest. Rights, not duties, are the foundations of 
the political philosophy by which we explain to 
ourselves our relation to the state. It is our rights, 
as citizens, that we are chiefly concerned about, 
and that we are always seeking to understand and 
to define and to assert, and to maintain. This is 
the aspect of political society upon which our cus- 
tomary thought is fixed. The whole tenor of politi- 
cal discussion makes this idea central. "We hold 
these truths to be self-evident," says the document 
to which we turn as the summation of all that is 
fundamental in our political theories, "that all 
men are created equal, that they are endowed by 
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that 
among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of 
Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Govern- 
ments are instituted among men, deriving their 
just powers from the consent of the governed." 
Rights, " unalienable Rights " are the subject mat- 
ter of political philosophy. Duties are secondary 

[195] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

interests. It seems to be considered that if our 
rights are claimed with sufficient emphasis and 
maintained with sufficient tenacity duties will take 
care of themselves. The right to vote, the right to 
hold office, the right to bear arms, the right of self- 
defence, these are the phrases which convey our 
conceptions of what is essential in citizenship. The 
" franchise " is what we call our personal charter 
of participation in the government, and a fran- 
chise is a right, or a privilege; the word conveys no 
suggestion of public duty. All the discussion of the 
newspaper, the caucus, the stump, the legislative 
chamber, gathers round this notion of the rights of 
the people; that is the phrase which the dema- 
gogue learns to conjure with. 

The influence of this conception is found outside 
of politics. It is likely to affect the entire social atti- 
tude of the man who entertains it. He learns to 
think of this as a country where every man has a 
right to do what is for his own advantage. He has a 
right to be protected, of course, by the laws, in the 
use of his liberty, and beyond that he has the right 
to do what he will with his time, his talents, his so- 
cial opportunities, his capital; to make all the 

[196] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

money he can ; to spend it as he pleases ; to push his 
personal fortunes by every means within his reach; 
to minister, in every way that seems good to him, to 
his own personal comfort and pleasure; to divest 
himself of all responsibility for the order and wel- 
fare of the community in which he lives. If rights 
are our main concern, if society rests primarily on 
rights, this is a natural and logical conclusion. 
Under the influence of such a ruling conception it 
is not to be wondered at that employers and la- 
bourers are gathered into hostile camps, maintain- 
ing their respective rights by the most destructive 
wars. Even into the family these conceptions have 
been creeping; we have been invited to conceive of 
this primordial society as based on rights ; and we 
have learned to discuss women's rights and men's 
rights and children's rights in such a way as to ob- 
scure the real bond that makes the household one. 
It is a sad day in any household when the disposi- 
tion of the individual members to emphasize their 
rights begins to be manifest. It is not by standing 
up for our rights as husbands and wives or as par- 
ents and children, that we promote the peace and 
happiness of the home. 

[197] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

It is by realizing what the consequences must be 
of making rights rather than duties central in the 
family relation that we are able to understand 
what is actually going on in the larger social or- 
ganism which we call the city or the state. The 
constructive principle of the one society is the 
same as that of the other; life is the law of both; 
and the parts or members of any living thing are 
not contending for their rights, they are perform- 
ing their functions, they are doing their duties. 
The same morbid conditions which would be 
found in the human body, if the various organs 
instead of performing their functions began to 
make it their concern to get out of the general cir- 
culation as much as they could for themselves ; the 
same morbid conditions which would appear in 
the family if each member thereof put rights above 
duties in his thought about the family relation, 
must appear in the commonwealth when the 
thought which is uppermost in the minds of its citi- 
zens is a thought of rights rather than of duties. 

It is thus that we confront what seems to me a 
radical defect in the habitual thinking of the aver- 
age American — a wrong conception of what is 

[198] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

fundamental in his relation to that government of 
his of which he is never tired of boasting. I do not 
say that this attitude of mind is universal, I only 
say that it is the general attitude, the prevailing 
attitude, that which gives form and tone to our 
public life. There are many among us who think 
much of public duty, and most of us have some 
thoughts about it; but the political idea which is 
uppermost in the mind of the average American is 
the idea of his rights as a citizen. 

It is a question of proportion, merely, of more 
and less. We think more of our rights and less of 
our duties : whereas if we were thinking normally 
— if we were conforming our thinking to the law 
of life — we should think more of our duties and 
less of our rights. It is a question of proportion, 
merely; but questions of proportion are of tremen- 
dous consequence. The deadly poison and the re- 
freshing cordial may be composed of the same in- 
gredients, with the proportions slightly changed; 
the question whether you shall live or die may be 
the question whether there was a little more of this 
or a little less of that in the draught which you have 
just swallowed. And the question whether the em- 

[199] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

phasis of our thinking about our relation to the 
commonwealth rests upon rights or duties is a 
question of life or death to a democracy. 

Let us follow this theory of rights to its logical 
issue. The citizen possesses the right to vote. A 
right is something personal to one's self, something 
that one can do with as he pleases. The right to 
vote involves the right to refuse to vote or to re- 
frain from voting. It is also generally understood to 
involve the right to cast the vote in such a way as 
shall secure the individual advantage of the voter. 
That, in the current conception, is what it is for. 
That conception easily makes room for the idea 
that the voter has a right to sell his vote for money. 
May not a man do what he will with his own? 
There are a great many citizens in the United 
States to-day who are logical enough to put this 
construction upon the matter; a vote, to them, is 
something which they can turn into money. This 
is the natural result of emphasizing the idea that 
the elective franchise is a personal right. 

Much the same thing can be said of office-hold- 
ing. The citizen, we say, has a right to hold office. 
The natural result of emphasizing the right has 

[200] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

been to convey the idea that the office which a man 
holds is his to use for his own aggrandizement. 
The whole spoils system rests on this idea. It 
means that he has a right to use the patronage 
which he can control to build up for himself a polit- 
ical machine by which his promotion may be se- 
cured, and a right to make himself, as long as he 
can, a pensioner upon the public treasury. It is not 
far from this conception of office to the idea that he 
has a right to use his official opportunities to enrich 
himself at the expense of the people whose repre- 
sentative he is, by granting legal privileges to those 
who live by exploiting and despoiling the people. 
These, I say, are the logical and inevitable re- 
sults of emphasizing rights and liberties as the cen- 
tral elements of citizenship. Rights are personal, 
individual; when I think of them my attention is 
concentrated upon myself. My interests are my 
main concern ; for the legal definition of a right is a 
legally protected interest. The entire result of put- 
ting the emphasis of our thinking, our teaching, 
our discussion upon rights is to develop an unso- 
cial temper, a disposition to seek our individual 
good at the expense of the community. 

[201] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

Suppose now that the logic of life had been fol- 
lowed. Suppose that the idea of duty had been 
made the central and constructive idea of our 
common life, from the beginning: that we had 
learned habitually to consider all our civic rela- 
tions as based upon functions rather than rights, 
upon duties more than liberties or privileges. Sup- 
pose that we had been in the habit of speaking of 
the elective responsibility instead of the elective 
franchise, and of thinking of voting primarily as a 
duty owed by us to the commonwealth and not as 
a right claimed by us from the commonwealth. 
Such a habit of thinking would have compelled us 
to approach the whole subject in a different spirit. 
The first question to be decided in conferring this 
power upon men would have been whether they 
are qualified to perform it. If voting is primarily a 
duty it is certainly no man's duty to undertake a 
task for which he has no fitness. And those on 
whom the power was conferred would have been 
constrained to think about it very differently from 
the ways in which the multitude are in the habit of 
thinking. When I am thinking of my duties I am 
considering the interests of those to whom my 

[202] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

duties are due. When I am thinking of my rights I 
am considering my own interests. A citizen to 
whom voting is a duty is in an entirely different 
state of mind from one to whom voting is a right. 
The one must be in a social temper; the other may 
be in an entirely unsocial temper. The one to 
whom voting is a personal right may easily enter- 
tain the idea of selling his vote; the one to whom it 
is a duty cannot think of such a thing. 

The same reasoning applies, of course, to office- 
holding. The man who regards it as a duty will not 
dream of setting himself up as a candidate for an 
office for which he is unfit, nor will the citizens, 
who so regard it, dream of committing office to 
such a man. And, on the other hand, the commun- 
ity in which the duty of serving the state is the par- 
amount sentiment will not be composed of people 
the great majority of whom always say when pub- 
lic service is required of them, " I pray thee have 
me excused." 

Consider how radically changed would be the 
attitude — the social attitude, the moral attitude 
— of the great mass of American citizens, if the 
emphasis of their thinking could be shifted from 

[203] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

their rights to their duties ; if they could be taught 
from infancy to think that citizenship rests upon 
duties rather than upon rights, and that when in a 
democracy, as in a family, duties are faithfully per- 
formed, rights may be trusted to take care of 
themselves. Is it not entirely obvious that the 
social and political evils of which we complain are 
due to the fact that we have emphasized rights at 
the expense of duties; that our entire system of 
political philosophy has fastened the attention of 
the people upon their interests rather than their 
obligations ? 

Perhaps we may get a clearer view of the dis- 
tinction I am trying to make if we look at it from 
another viewpoint. The notion which often pre- 
vails concerning our democracy is that is it simply 
an extension of privilege. The privilege of ruling 
which once belonged to the monarch and the aris- 
tocracy is now extended to the people. What is 
privilege ? It is power claimed or conceded in de- 
rogation of the common interest. It is a possession 
which one holds adverse to the claims of others. 
The privilege of ruling, which was once enjoyed by 
the king and the nobles, is now divided up among 

[204] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 
the multitude. To the king and the nobles this was 
a means of aggrandizement; so it is to the people 
who have received it at their hands. The king and 
the nobles were supposed to use it to compel others 
to serve their interests; the people now endeavour 
to use it, each for himself, to make his fellows serve 
his interests. A vote is therefore a weapon which a 
man can wield in the protection of his rights and 
the promotion of his fortunes ; an office is an oppor- 
tunity of getting a living at the public expense or of 
exercising power over others, which is one of the 
common objects of selfish desire. Those whose 
minds are imbued with this fundamental idea of 
false democracy, that it is simply the extension of 
privilege, are apt to reveal their belief in their con- 
duct. The tax-payer whose mind is infected with 
this notion will hide his property from the assessor; 
he wishes the benefits of the commonwealth, but 
he intends that others shall pay for them. The 
shiftless pauper will get his food and fuel from the 
public crib; why should he work when there are 
funds on which he can lay his hands ? The selfish 
politician will seek office for which he has no fit- 
ness and will use his opportunities in office to en- 

[205] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

rich himself. The greedy corporation will scheme 
to get contracts by which it may heavily tax the 
public. The demagogue will attack the corporation 
in order that he may get his hands into the public 
treasury. Citizenship, in this conception, is the 
privilege of levying toll upon the community; no- 
body will do anything for the public unless he 
hopes in some way to get gain out of it for himself. 
If citizenship, in a democracy, is only the extension 
to the many of the selfish privileges formerly en- 
joyed by the ruling few, this is the logical way for 
the citizens of a democracy to behave. 

The bottom difference between false democracy 
and true democracy is that the essence of citizen- 
ship is privilege in the one and service in the other. 
In the one the typical citizen is using what power 
he has to make all the rest minister to him; in the 
other he is identifying his interests with those of all 
the rest and seeking how he may promote the 
common welfare. 

I am not going to try to tell how much there is of 
false democracy and how much of true democracy 
in the United States of America. I believe that 
there is a great deal of genuine unselfishness in the 

[206] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

hearts of our people, and that there are many in 
office and out of office who are ready to serve with- 
out gain or reward, many who do not wish to re- 
ceive from the commonwealth benefits for which 
they make no adequate return. Yet not a few, even 
of these, I fear, are cherishing a false theory of this 
relation — a theory that government is a kind of 
equilibrium of warring selfishnesses; a system of 
checks and balances in which the greed and rapac- 
ity of one is neutralized by the greed and rapacity 
of another, so that in the universal scramble a kind 
of rude alligation of interests is wrought out. That 
theory rests, of course, on the notion that the foun- 
dation of citizenship is personal privilege, and it 
warrants a thoroughgoing selfishness in the rela- 
tion of the individual to the state. The theory is 
bad enough to give us pandemonium; the relief is 
in the fact that there are a great many among us 
who are far better than their theories. But it is too 
true that there are millions who are more consist- 
ent; who believe in total political depravity and, as 
the wag said, live up to it as well as they can; who 
accept, ex animo, the principle of a false democ- 
racy, that citizenship is personal privilege, and 

[207] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

conform their conduct to that principle. Just to the 
extent to which this theory governs the conduct of 
the citizens, do the active social forces tend to the 
destruction of the state. A democracy founded on 
that principle would be the worst possible form of 
government. The greatest tyrant that ever ex- 
isted could not begin to do the injury which such a 
democracy would be sure to do. If the game is 
grab, seventy millions of grabbers are indefinitely 
worse than one grabber. If ruling is a matter of 
privilege, we do not mend matters much by split- 
ting privilege into fragments and distributing 
them among the populace. Armed with these frac- 
tional privileges the populace becomes the worst 
oppressor the world has ever known. 

It might be well for us to reflect that kings do 
not always assume that ruling is with them a mat- 
ter of personal privilege. The kings of England 
bear upon their crests, from childhood, as Princes 
of Wales, this motto : " Ich dien ; " I serve. If that 
were really true of a king, if he accepted heartily 
the words of the only real King who ever lived 
upon this planet, "He that will be chief among 
you, let him be the servant of all," we should have 

[208] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

less reason to complain of kings. Unhappily it has 
not been true of all kings; too often they have ex- 
alted privilege above service, and that is the false 
kinghood. But as the distribution among the peo- 
ple of the ruling principle of the false kinghood 
creates a false democracy, which is the worst gov- 
ernment in the world, so the distribution among 
them, and the hearty acceptance by them of the 
ruling principle of true kinghood, the principle of 
service, would bring in the true democracy, which 
is the best government in the world. A democracy 
in which all the people were seeking, not each to 
intrench himself in privilege, but each to minister 
to the good of all — a democracy in which greed 
was supplanted by good-will, and the joyful effort 
of the united community was an effort to increase 
the common fund of good — that would be a polit- 
ical society in which, I think, we should all like 
to live. 

I do not think, young men and women, that it is 
possible to overstate the importance of the subject 
which I have brought before your minds this morn- 
ing. Your own happiness, the happiness of the 
communities in which you live, will largely depend 

[209] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
on the extent to which this simple, elementary 
truth is recognized and obeyed. The radical evils 
now infesting society, the dangers with which our 
civilization is threatened result, in the last analysis, 
from the fact that men have put privilege before 
service and rights above duties. In doing this they 
have reversed the order of life, for the members of 
any living organism know no privilege apart from 
service, and get their rights in fulfilling their func- 
tions. That is the law of life; it is the law of social 
life; and we shall never have peaceful and prosper- 
ous social life until we understand it and follow it. 
We are members one of another; that is the eter- 
nal fact, and any system of politics or jurisprudence 
which disputes it or tries to evade it will end in fric- 
tions and fractions, in disintegration and chaos. 

It seems to follow from this argument that what 
is most needed in this democracy is a radical 
change in our ruling ideas concerning the founda- 
tions of citizenship. That is the serious fact. It is 
idle to imagine that changes in our governmental 
machinery, or in the organization of our indus- 
tries will bring us peace; the trouble lies deeper, in 
our primary conceptions. What we have got to 

[210] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

have, if we want the true democracy, is a different 
kind of men and women — men and women to 
whom duties are more than rights, and service 
dearer than privilege. 

The great questions which you will have to solve 
will find their prosperous solution in the recogni- 
tion of this principle as fundamental in society. 
And the call which comes to you from u the future 
in the distance " is a great and urgent appeal that 
you will do what you can to get this conception 
deeply fixed in the thoughts of your fellow-men. 

You think that a large undertaking, and it is; 
but greater things than this have been done in the 
world's history, and many mighty forces are work- 
ing with you to prepare the minds of men for the 
reception of this great truth. 

One thing you can do, every one of you. You 
can accept this truth for yourselves, and let it gov- 
ern your own lives. You can resolve that, by God's 
grace, you will endeavour henceforth to make the 
performance of your duties and not the assertion 
of your rights your paramount concern in all rela- 
tions in which you are placed, social relations, bus- 
iness relations, political relations. You can deter- 

[211] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

mine that henceforth, if God will help you, you 
will think less about getting what the world owes 
you, and more about giving the world all the love 
and service that you owe to it. Would that be a 
change of heart ? To some of us it would, no doubt, 
be a change of heart, a real conversion; it is, in 
fact, the only kind of conversion that amounts to 
anything. Could you do it without God's help? 
No; no man ever did any good thing without 
God's help — just as no man ever rowed down 
stream without the help of the current. If you go 
the way the river is going you get the help of the 
river. If you fling yourself upon the current of 
God's almightiness, it will bear you up and carry 
you on. For that is the way the river is going! The 
increasing purpose of God, flowing through the 
ages with resistless stream, to which every discov- 
ery, every invention, every revolution is tributary, 
sets steadily toward this divine event of co-opera- 
tion, solidarity, brotherhood. That is what democ- 
racy means, and it is time for us to get hold of its 
real meaning. 

"The world has lost interest," says Charles Fer- 
guson, "in the discouraging theorem that no man 

[212] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

is better than another. Nor does it find satisfaction 
in the rule of the majority. There is no advantage 
in being bullied by a crowd. The democracy of 
blank negations is played out. 

" Yes, let us confess it plainly, if democracy con- 
tained what the politicians have said that it con- 
tained and no more, it would be an entirely hope- 
less enterprise, the climax of unreason, the apothe- 
osis of the absurd, the consummate delusion of 
history, the destruction of every sweet and human 
thing and the end of the world. . . . 

"Democracy, regarded as a balloting contriv- 
ance for equating the hoof and claw of warring 
private interests, is an ingenious futility. Let it pass 
now to its place in the museums of antiquities." 

It is for you, young men and women, for you 
and those who will stand with you, to lift into the 
light the banner of the new democracy, which dif- 
fers from the old as the Copernician astronomy 
differs from the Ptolemaic; to discern its divine 
meaning, and believe in it, and bear witness to it, 
and live to lead men into its larger freedom. 

I give you joy of that future which many of you 
will see, and part of which you will be. It will be a 

[213] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

better time than any of us have ever known, be- 
cause men will more and more discern and obey 
the law of life. Good would it be, when the clock of 
this century shall strike high noon, to stand with 
those of you who will survive and look back upon 
what has been won for freedom and humanity — 
upon what you shall have helped to win — and listen 
to the songs that shall celebrate your triumph: 

" Hail to the coming singers ! 
Hail to the brave light-bring ers ! 
Forward I reach and share 
All that they sing and dare. 

" The airs of heaven blow oer me, 
A glory shines before me, 
Of what mankind shall be, 
Pure, generous, brave and free. 

" A dream of man and woman 9 
Diviner but still human, 
Solving the riddle old, 
Shaping the Age of Gold. 

" The love of God and neighbour^ 
An equal-handed labour, 
The richer life where beauty 
Walks hand in hand with duty." 

[214] 



RIGHTS AND DUTIES 

We shall not all be there, but in that glory you 
will not forget this day; and there will be some- 
thing of our lives, I trust, in the hearts that throb 
to the music of that millennial song. 



[215] 



The New Century and the 
New Nation* 



♦Address delivered before the Congregational Association of 
Illinois, at Oak Park, May 23, 1900. 



IN one of the prophecies of Isaiah we find a 
wail for the losses suffered by the people in some 
war, possibly the war which preceded the exile. 
The prophet thinks of the numberless dead whose 
bodies are hidden in the earth; he sees the return- 
ing exiles wandering among the graves of their 
kindred, and no incantation avails to recall these 
departed ones. If they had had our own Psalmist 
to tell their woe they might have sung: 

Look where we may, the wide earth o'er 
Those lighted faces smile no more ; 
We tread the paths their feet have worn, 
We sit beneath their orchard trees, 
We hear, like them, the hum of bees 
And rustle of the bladed corn, 
We turn the pages that they read, 
The written words we linger o'er, 
But in the sun they cast no shade, 
No voice is heard, no sign is made, 
No step is on the conscious floor. 

[219] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

The desolation of the exiles as they came back 
to find their land empty of all that had made it 
dear is movingly depicted in the bold imagery of 
this prophecy. But in this very hour of humiliation 
we hear a voice of exultation because of the spread- 
ing life of the nation. The remnant which has 
returned is numerically weaker than the former 
population, but it is politically stronger. The exper- 
iences of the exile have immensely added to the 
efficiency of those who have returned. There are 
enough of them and they are strong enough not 
only to possess the land and fill it with greater 
glory than that of the former time, but its borders 
are henceforth to be greatly enlarged. A vigorous 
nation has really no frontiers; its energies flow out 
on every side, to the east and the west and the 
north and the south. Thus, in the prophet's 
glowing thought, the paths are opened for the out- 
going forces of Israel; it will no longer be penned 
within the narrow limits of Palestine; out of Zion 
shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord 
from Jerusalem. The forcible deportation of the 
people has given them a larger world to live in; it 
is as if their boundaries had been widened. " Thou 

[220] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 
hast increased the nation, O Lord," cries the 
prophet. "Thou hast increased the nation; thou 
hast enlarged ail the borders of the land, " — or, as 
the marginal reading puts it, " thou hast removed 
it far unto all the ends of the earth. " Thus the 
suffering through which the nation has passed 
has enriched and broadened the national life; 
the corn of wheat has fallen into the ground that 
it might bring forth much fruit, and spread its 
harvests over all the earth. 

Our own national experiences has not been al- 
together parallel to that of Israel; our nation has 
not been conquered and crushed and carried into 
exile; nevertheless, there has come to us within 
the past two years some bitter and sobering ex- 
perience. We have been engaged in wasting war, 
and there are many households throughout the 
land which have been made desolate. I do not think 
that this nation lightly regards these sacrifices of 
the flower of its youth; our hearts cry out against 
them; we are waiting and longing for the day when 
these " savage wars of peace " shall be at an end. 

But there has surely come to us, as there came 
to Israel, though in other ways, something of that 

[221] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

extension of the frontiers of which this prophet is 
singing. I am not going to discuss the process by 
which this enlargement has come to us; I only 
desire to recognize the fact that it has come, and 
to consider with you what we are going to do with 
it. Whether we like it or deplore it we are living in 
a very different nation to-day from that in which 
we were living two years ago to-day. Considerable 
territory which was not then ours is unquestion- 
ably in our possession to-day; and that territory is 
inhabited by people to whom we are bound to give 
freedom and Christian civilization. Of the dispo- 
sition of that portion of this territory concerning 
which there is controversy I will not speak, for 
this is not a political discussion; but I think no one 
will dispute the fact that, no matter what happens, 
great and heavy responsibilities for the welfare of 
the people residing in all that territory must be 
ours for many years. 

But, above all, we have come to the conscious- 
ness that we are one of the world powers, and 
that in the solution of the questions respecting 
those portions of the earth which are now unde- 
veloped or partially developed we must take 

[222] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 
our part. The diplomatic negotiations of our 
State Department with China illustrate the posi- 
tion; that our representatives wielded an influ- 
ence second to none in the great Conference at 
The Hague is another striking circumstance. The 
destiny of the habitable globe is to be largely de- 
termined in coming days by consultation and co- 
operation of the world powers, with less and less of 
physical conflict between them; our nation is one 
of the world powers, and in these great responsi- 
bilities we shall be constrained to take a part. The 
comparative isolation which we have hitherto main- 
tained is not to be our privilege any longer; ours is 
an adult member of the great family of nations; 
we shall take our seat at the council table and 
bear our part in the larger affairs of civilization. 
The movement toward some kind of world parlia- 
ment is irresistible; we may get to it after some 
disastrous struggles, but we shall get to it; we are 
going that way steadily and surely. And it is hardly 
to be conceived that in such a tribunal the United 
States would fail to be represented. 

Thus we are launched, rather suddenly, upon 
great affairs; the borders of our nation, and the 

[223] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
lines of its duty and responsibility are extended, 
like those of Israel after the exile, to the ends of 
the earth. 

This does not justify us in giving less attention to 
our own domestic concerns; far from it; it is the 
strongest argument which has ever been urged, 
why we should take hold of these domestic con- 
cerns with vigour and determination. Because 
these larger responsibilities have come upon us, 
we must fit ourselves to bear them. We have un- 
dertaken to cure the disorders of other peoples, and 
the word comes back to us: "Physician heal 
thyself!" 

I believe, for my own part, that these enlarged 
relations and obligations will tend to bring out the 
better qualities of the American people; to make 
them less bumptious and boastful; more sober, 
more conscientious, more wise and just. I believe 
this, because I believe in the essential moral sound- 
ness of the American people. I believe that the na- 
tion, in its integrity, means to do right, and in all 
the larger decisions can be trusted to do right. 
With individuals of this character, we always find 
that the increase of responsibility confirms and 

[224] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 
strengthens their highest qualities. And I cannot 
doubt that the same will be true of this nation. 

This, at any rate, is the wish and the prayer and 
the hope of every true American. No man has any 
right to cherish any other expectation. This is the 
note of a genuine patriotism — the faith that this 
nation must and will fit herself for the great tasks 
of the future. 

There are two kinds of patriotism. First is the 
variety which seeks to separate one's country from 
other countries, and set her over against them, as 
their rival or enemy, — and then glories in her 
power to outshine or overcome them, to put them 
to shame by her superiority, or to bring them to 
her feet in subjection. 

The other is the patriotism which seeks to iden- 
tify one's country with the interests of our com- 
mon humanity; which considers her as the helper 
and friend of all the needy, as the champion of the 
oppressed, as a leader among these who are work- 
ing to extend the boundaries of freedom and 
peace, and eager to co-operate with all other 
peoples of good-will in breaking down the barriers 
that keep nations apart. The latter is the only kind 

[225] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 
of patriotism which Christian men will cultivate. 
We have a right to love our country with a pas- 
sionate love, if our country bears such a character 
as this; if the whole world knows that she is the 
champion of justice and the messenger of good- 
will among the nations. To fit her for such work as 
this is the highest object that any Christian man 
can entertain. 

I want the Christian men and women in this 
house to-night to think well of these great new re- 
sponsibilities of our national commonwealth, of 
the burdens that have thus been so suddenly laid 
upon us, of our lack of readiness to undertake 
them, of the great need which they emphasize of 
the correction of our defects, and of the purging 
of our national life from the wrongs and abuses 
that abound, — to think well of all these things 
and ask themselves what they have to do in the 
matter; what part of this responsibility rests on 
them. What this nation needs, in this day of its 
testing, is a great reinforcement of all the moral 
forces — the forces that make for purity and right- 
eousness. The Christian people must leave noth- 
ing undone that they can do to strengthen the in- 

[226] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 

fluences that help toward the enlightenment of the 
consciences, the elevation of the ideals, the invigo- 
ration of the moral purposes of the citizens of 
this country. We must save the country. We must 
save it from the plotting of selfish men who are 
bent on using its offices and its revenues for their 
personal aggrandizement. We must save it from 
the blight and pestilence which spreads from those 
regions where intrenched ignorance breeds bru- 
tality and crime. We must save it from the creep- 
ing paralysis of materialism, and the benumbing 
of the public conscience through the worship of 
wealth. We must save it by strengthening in every 
community the institutions that stand for truth 
and righteousness. 

And we ought to go about this business of 
ethicizing, or Christianizing this nation — of 
filling the national mind with truth and the nation- 
al conscience with light and the national will with 
vigour — this business of equipping the nation for 
the great tasks to which God has called her, as if 
we expected to succeed in it; to see immediate and 
notable results. We are quite too apt to feel that 
such a result as this must be a great way off; that 

[227] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

we should be Quixotic and visionary if we looked 
for any speedy changes. We are prone to say to 
ourselves: It is now nineteen centuries since 
Christ was born, and see how far we are yet from 
accepting His Gospel and making His law the rule 
of our lives! 

But there are considerations to which your 
thought should now be turned which greatly tend 
to modify this disheartening conclusion. Listen to 
Mr. Pike: 

A most fallacious method of estimating what is likely 
to be, is to compute future advances by the rate of 
progress hitherto achieved. To one who gives thoughtful 
attention to the field at large, the cumulative tendencies 
manifested in all departments of human activity are 
startling. The greatest gains for an equal period in the 
condition of the labourer have been made within the 
memory of living men. The wealth of the United States 
between the two census years 1880 and 1890 increased 
beyond the combined previous accumulations since the 
landing of Columbus. . . . An important thing to 
notice is that progress is not only continuous, but the 
rate of progress is accelerated and the steps in advance 
more comprehensive and far reaching in their results. 

For a striking illustration of this last statement 
take the comparison made by Mr. Alfred Russell 

[228] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 
Wallace, in his book entitled u The Wonderful Cen- 
tury, " of the great inventions and discoveries of 
the nineteenth century with those of all past time. 
His computation is this : that of inventions of the 
first rank, thirteen have been given to the world in 
the nineteenth century, — namely, railways, steam 
navigation, electric telegraphs, the telephone, 
friction matches, gas-lighting, electric lighting, 
photography, the phonograph, the Roentgen rays, 
spectrum analysis, the use of anaesthetics, and an- 
tiseptic surgery. Against these in all preceding 
time he is able to place but five of equal rank — 
the telescope, the printing-press, the mariner's 
compass, Arabic numerals, and alphabetical 
writing — to which may possibly be added the 
steam engine and the barometer — making seven 
in all as against thirteen in one single century. 

Of theoretical discoveries of the first rank, he 
credits the nineteenth century with twelve and the 
whole of previous time with only eight, so that the 
footing gives this century a total of twenty-five 
great gains to human knowledge and power, to only 
fifteen in all the preceding ages. 

" Of course," says Mr. Wallace, "these numbers 

[229] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

are not absolute. Either series may be increased or 
diminished by taking account of other discoveries 
as of equal importance, or by striking out some 
which may be considered as below the grade of an 
important or epoch-making step in science or in 
civilization. But the difference between the two 
lists is so large that probably no competent judge 
would bring them to an equality. 

" It appears, then, that the statement in my first 
chapter that to get any adequate comparison with 
the nineteenth century we must take, not any pre- 
ceding century or group of centuries, but rather 
the whole preceding epoch of human history is 
justified and more than justified by the compara- 
tive lists now given. And if we take into consider- 
ation the changes affected in science, in the arts, in 
all the possibilities of human intercourse, and in 
the extension of our knowledge, both of the earth 
and the whole visible universe, the difference 
shown by the mere numbers of these advances will 
have to be considerably increased on account of the 
marvellous character and vast possibilities of fur- 
ther development of many of our recent dis- 



coveries. " 



[230] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 

Here, now, are reasons why we should not be 
hopeless concerning the rapid movement of the 
Christian ideas in this generation. Men have been 
studying chemistry and physics ever since the days 
of Thales of Miletus, but more wonderful things 
have been found in that realm during the last ten 
years, than in two thousand years before. Men 
have been studying the words of Christ for nineteen 
centuries, but it is by no means impossible that they 
will not find out more about their real meaning, — 
that the words themselves will not reveal more 
power over the world in the next ten years than 
they have had in all the past Christian centuries. 
Indeed, there is reason to hope that as in the world 
of the physical sciences we have just fairly got 
under way, so in the ethical and spiritual world 
we may be making ready for very rapid forward 
movements. Let us call Mr. Pike once more : 

An inexhaustible future beckons a race that feels the 
energies of the eternal God tingling in its nerves. We 
are part of a growing organism, and human progress is a 
living experience, therefore there is hope ahead. That 
which is impossible now, is becoming possible. Men are 
willing to sacrifice the present to the future, and to la- 
bour on assured that to-day's dream will have become 

[231] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

the fact to-morrow. Our race is grounded in God, and 
we shall yet partake in unimagined measure of His 
infinitude." 

"7/ twenty million summers are stored in the sunlight 
still, 
We are jar from the noon of man, there is room for the 
race to grow." 

I wonder if all of us are as clear in our minds as 
we ought to be respecting the possibility of great 
and radical changes in the ruling ideas of men. We 
all believe in conversion — that individuals may be 
changed in the spirit of their minds; do we believe 
as fully as we should in those larger operations of 
the spirit by which the social standards are revised, 
and public opinion is invigorated and purified. 
You may say that all this is the result of changes in 
the thoughts of individuals ; but are not the thoughts 
of individuals changed by the social environment, 
by the social atmosphere in which they live and 
move and have their being ? We are too much in the 
habit of thinking of human nature as a fixed quan- 
tity, an unchangeable element — as permanently 
hostile to all that is good; but that is a crude con- 
ception. Human nature itself changes with the grow- 

[232] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 
ing light : human nature is not in America and in 
England to-day just what it was where civilization 
was at its highest point one thousand years ago or 
two thousand years ago. " Human nature, " says 
Arnold Toynbee, " is not always the same. It slowly 
changes, and is modified by higher ideals and wider 
and deeper conceptions of justice. Men have forgot- 
ten that though it is impossible to change the nature 
of a stone or a rock, human nature is pliable, and 
pliable above all to nobler ideas and to a truer sense 
of justice. It may be said "This is chimerical: hu- 
man nature will be the same, and always has been 
the same. ' This I deny, and I instance that great 
change of opinion which took place in England 
with regard to slavery. If such a rapid change 
could take place in our moral ideas within the last 
hundred years, do you not think it possible that in 
the course of another hundred years English em- 
ployers and English labourers may act upon higher 
notions of duty and higher conceptions of citizen- 
ship than they do now ? " 

But how is it that human nature changes ? Only 
by the changes in the ruling ideas of human so- 
ciety. A man is changed by getting new ideas of 

[233] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

what life means, of what things are worth most. 
The face of society, the heart of society is changed 
by filling the minds of men with new thoughts about 
life and duty. "Repent ye! Change your minds!" 
is the cry of the Forerunner, and the first procla- 
mation of the King Himself. Men can and do change 
their minds; new thoughts about life prevail over 
old thoughts, displacing them, and transforming 
the very structure of society itself. 

Toynbee has spoken of the change of men's 
thoughts with respect to slavery; it is part of the 
great transition which has been made, almost with- 
in our knowledge, from feudalism to democracy. 
Only a little more than a century ago feudal con- 
ceptions were dominating the thought of the whole 
Western world. To-day, in the front of the advanc- 
ing host the banners of democracy are everywhere 
lifted up. May we not say that the ideas of dem- 
ocracy are the ruling ideas of civilization at the end 
of this century ? Do you think that this is merely a 
political reconstruction ? Is it registered nowhere 
but in the statutes and the paper constitutions? 
No, it is a change of thoughts, feelings, standards of 
judgment, regulative principles of conduct; it is an 

[234] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 
intellectual and moral change; it is a change in 
human nature. The average boy, brought up in a 
Christian home in America and educated in the 
public school, is a different kind of boy from the 
one who was brought up in a Christian home two 
hundred years ago, and educated in the best schools 
of that time; his ways of thinking and feeling about 
his fellow-men are different ways. I do not mean to 
affirm that all selfishness is extirpated from the 
human nature; there is still a vast amount of greed 
and cruelty and perfidy in human society; there 
is still need of radical changes in human hearts. 
Great changes have taken place in the iron of the 
malleable bar since it was dug from the earth; 
great changes must still be wrought in it before it 
becomes the Damascus blade. The changes in hu- 
man nature are progressive changes. 

" They say 
The solid earth whereon we tread 
In tracks of fluent heat began, 

And grew to seeming random forms, 

The seeming prey of cyclic storms, 
Till at the last arose the man ; 
Who throve and branched from clime to clime, 

The herald of a higher race, 

[235] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

And of himself in higher place, 
If so he type this work of time, 
Within himself, from more to more." 

The truth to be seized and held is this : that hu- 
man nature is not a fixed quality ; that already, under 
the transforming power of that Creative Spirit, who 
is surely not further from the world to-day than 
when he brooded over the elemental chaos in crea- 
tion's morning, it has passed through many won- 
derful change, that these transformations in the 
moral and the social world are likely to be more 
rapid and more radical in the century before us 
than in the century behind us. With this faith we 
face the future. There are great tasks for our na- 
tion; and for these tasks the nation is as yet al- 
together unfit; it needs to be renewed in the spirit 
of its mind; it needs to have its temper chastened, 
its ideals transfigured, its heart purified. And the 
thing for us to understand is that this transforma- 
tion is not an unreasonable hope. There is nothing 
Utopian about it. 

What is needed to-day, as any man can see, is 
that we should realize our democracy. It is in a 
very partial sense that our nation is democratized. 

[236] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 
We have the forms of political democracy, but we 
have the substance of industrial feudalism. 

What is democracy? It rests upon a recogni- 
tion of human brotherhood. Its philosophy is 
found in Paul's figure of the many members and 
the one body; in that social paraphrase of the 
Golden Rule: 

"Each for all and all for each." 

Our political theories rest firmly on this founda- 
tion; whatever our practice may be we are clear in 
our minds that this is the true philosophic basis of 
human society. But our industrial and economic 
life has, hitherto, wholly rejected and spurned 
this conception; here a pure individualism has 
dominated our thought. Our politics, so far as 
their theory is concerned, have been partly Chris- 
tianized; our economic life has all the while been 
frankly and consistently Pagan, in its theories. 
The consequence is that our political practice has 
been pulled down by our economic practice and has 
become increasingly mercenary; the principle of 
the spoils system has overgrown and choked the 
democratic idea, which is the Christian idea. 

[237] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

These two opposing principles have been con- 
tending hitherto for the mastery in our society; 
the Christian principle, the principle of brother- 
hood, which is the foundation of our democ- 
racy; the Pagan principle, the principle of every 
man for himself, which is the foundation of our 
economic life. They cannot live together, any 
more than slavery and freedom could live together. 
One or the other will win the supremacy. Lincoln 
said that the nation would become wholly a slave 
nation or wholly a free nation; the alternative now 
before us is just as inevitable. Hitherto the tend- 
ency has been, in large departments of our life, to 
supplant the Christian principle by the Pagan 
principle. Business is with most of us an inter- 
est so large and so engrossing that it tends to give 
the law to the whole of life. We send men out into 
the world and train them to discriminate their own 
interests from the interests of their fellows, and to 
push their own interests regardless of the interests 
of their fellows and then expect them when they 
are called to the performance of political duties to 
forget all that they have learned and to begin to 
think and act in the interests of the common- 

[238] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 

wealth. That is not a reasonable expectation. They 
will not do it. They will go right on, looking out 
for themselves, taking advantage of their oppor- 
tunities, pushing their own interests, with small 
regard for the common interest. That is the natu- 
ral and logical thing for them to do. 

A house divided against itself cannot stand. We 
cannot have an industrial system which rests on 
the Pagan principle of self-assertion, the power of 
the strongest, and a political system which rests on 
the Christian principle of brotherhood, " Each for 
all and all for each. " Our business must be 
Christianized or our politics will be completely 
paganized or feudalized. Which shall it be ? That 
is the question which confronts us on the thresh- 
old of the twentieth century. 

What has the Church to say about it? The 
Church represents, or is supposed to represent, 
Christianity. Does the Church believe that the na- 
tion can be thoroughly Christianized, in its business 
life, as well as in its political life ? Is the Church 
enforcing the law of Christ as the law of the com- 
mercial and economic realms, not less than of the 
ecclesiastical and domestic realms ? It seems to me 

[239] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

that the Church ought to have clear ideas on this 
subject and positive convictions. If Christ is Lord 
of all, if all the kingdoms of this world belong to 
him, we ought to be able to make the world be- 
lieve it. 

I have said that the one thing needful for us as a 
nation is that we should realize our democracy, 
that we should frankly accept it, as the foundation 
of our national life and build the whole social 
fabric upon it. Can the Church give us any aid in 
this ? It would seem that she ought to be able to do 
so, since the principle of democracy is nothing 
other than the principle of brotherhood — the 
principle of the Christian law. Is the Church ready 
to take her own principle and go out into the 
world with it and make it regnant everywhere ? Is 
the Church prepared to make all men see that 
there is no other law by which human beings can 
associate themselves for any purpose than the law 
of love, the law of service ? It seems to me that what 
the new century is calling for, in trumpet tones, is 
such a Christianity as this. It is not a very new 
Christianity; it is almost nineteen hundred years 
old; but it must be admitted that when it is preach- 

[240] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 
ed to-day it makes upon many minds the impres- 
sion of novelty. 

I have no doubt that to many it will seem that 
such a proposition is wholly Utopian. But I have 
been trying to show you to-night that there are 
sound reasons for entertaining it : that it is rational 
to look for swift movements of Christian thought; 
for rapid developments in the Kingdom of Heaven. 
It may come as quickly as spring comes in the 
northern latitudes, bursting, in a week, from the 
ice-bound clods to greenery and bloom. There is 
preparation for it in the hearts of men. The busi- 
ness world is restless and weary; the fierce compe- 
titions are becoming intolerable; men are casting 
about for ways of escaping from them; the great 
combinations which are now taking place are not 
wholly the product of greed; they are signs that 
men cannot bear to be always fighting and want to 
get together. True, that with the power they wield 
they generally become instruments of still greater 
extortion, but with many who enter into them 
other motives prevail. Most serious-minded busi- 
ness men are free to confess that the principle of 
strife is all wrong; that somehow we must learn to 

[241] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

co-operate. With the machinery of co-operation I 
am not much concerned : I only wish to have the 
principle recognized that no man liveth to him- 
self; that no man's business is his business alone; 
that all business is stewardship; that there is no 
law of life but Christ's law; that the main ques- 
tion for every man is not how much he can get, 
but how much he can give. I know that that prin- 
ciple would give to the world plenty and content- 
ment and universal welfare; that it would banish 
the slums and exterminate the plutocrats and the 
monopolies; that it would put an end to strikes of 
labour and strifes of capital and wars of conquest ; 
that it would fill the world with the abundance of 
peace so long as the moon endureth. Such a change 
in the ruling ideas of the business world would 
quickly make itself felt in the political realm. When 
men begin to recognize the law of service and stew- 
ardship as governing their economic relations, it 
will be easy enough to enforce that law in the larger 
relations of the city and the state. And thus the na- 
tion, Christianized at the centres of its life, would 
be equipped for the great tasks to which, in the un- 
folding centuries, God's providence is calling it. 

[242] 



THE NEW CENTURY AND THE NEW NATION 

And I protest that this is not a chimerical idea. 
To believe that we can realize our democracy is 
not a fanciful notion. To trust in the regnancy of 
love over all the world is not a misplaced reliance. 
To look for the coming of the King in His glory is 
not a vain expectation. And this is the way of His 
coming : 

He shall come down like showers 

Upon the fruitful earth, 
And love and joy like flowers 

Spring in his path to birth ; 
Before him on the mountains 

Shall peace the herald go> 
And righteousness, in fountains, 

From hill to valley flow. 

Let us go out into the new century with this great 
hope in our hearts, claiming the whole of life for 
our Master and crowning Him Lord of all. 



[243] 



The Prince of Life 

A CHRISTMAS SERMON 



1 HIS is the phrase with which Peter, in his 
great speech in the temple porch, describes the 
Master whose disciple he had been for three years, 
whose death he had witnessed on Calvary, and to 
whose resurrection from the dead he is now bear- 
ing witness. "The Prince of life!" It is one of the 
many great titles conferred upon the Lord by those 
who loved Him. Reverence and devotion fell from 
their lips in lyrical cadences whenever they spoke 
of Him, and they wreathed for Him garlands of 
words with which they loved to deck His memory. 
He was "the Prophet of the Highest;" He was 
"the Great High Priest;" He was "the Shepherd 
of the Sheep;" He was "the Captain of Salva- 
tion;" He was "the First-Born of Many 
Brethren;" He was "Redeemer," "Reconciler," 
" Saviour." Gratitude and affection shaped many a 
tender phrase in which to describe Him, but there 

[247] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

is none, perhaps, more luminous or more compre- 
hensive than this with which the impulsive Peter, 
facing the men who had put Him to death, gave 
utterance to his loyalty. Its pertinence is confirmed 
by the word of Jesus Himself, in one of the sayings 
in which He described His mission: "I am come 
that ye might have life, and that ye might have it 
abundantly." Author and Giver of life He was, and 
what He gave He gave with princely munificence, 
freely, unstintedly. 

The phrase seems to be one on which we may 
fitly dwell to-day, since the day of the year which 
commemorates His birth occurs on the day of the 
week which celebrates His resurrection. Both 
events proclaim Him the Prince of life. In the one 
He is the bringer of new life, in the other He is the 
victor over death; and thus He becomes, in the im- 
passioned confessions of the apostle, the Alpha 
and the Omega, the Author and the Finisher of 
faith, the First and the Last and the Living One. 

Those who are familiar with the New Testa- 
ment narration do not need to have their attention 
called to the constant ministry of this Son of Man 
to the vital needs of men. The impartation of life 

[248] 



THE PRINCE OF LIFE 

seems to have been His main business. Somehow it 
came to be believed by the multitude, at the very 
beginning of His public ministry, that He pos- 
sessed some power of communicating life. The 
wonderful works ascribed to Him are nearly all of 
this character. The healing of the sick, the cleans- 
ing of the lepers, all resulted from the reinforce- 
ment of the vital energies of the sufferers. When He 
laid His hand upon men, new life seemed to speed 
through their veins. We have known some who 
seemed to have, in some imperfect way, this quick- 
ening touch. It is a physiological fact that warm 
blood from the veins of a thoroughly healthy per- 
son, transfused through the veins of one who is 
emaciated or exhausted, quickens the wavering 
pulse and brings life to the dying. It may be that 
through the nerve tissues, as well as through the 
veins, the same vitalizing force may be communi- 
cated, and that those who are in perfect health, 
both of body and of mind, may have the power of 
imparting life to those who are in need of it. The 
miracles of healing ascribed to Jesus must have 
been miracles in the literal sense; they were won- 
ders, marvels — for that is what the word miracle 

[249] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

means; that they were interruptions or violations 
of natural law is never intimated in the New Testa- 
ment; they may have been purely natural occur- 
rences, taking place under the operation of natu- 
ral laws with which we are not familiar. We are far 
from knowing all the secrets of this wonderful uni- 
verse; the time may come when these words of 
Jesus will have larger meaning than we have ever 
given them : " If ye abide in Me, the works that I 
do shall ye do also, and greater works than these 
shall ye do, because I go unto My Father." 

The fact to be noted is, however, that the people 
with whom Jesus was brought into contact were 
made aware in many ways of the impartation of 
His life to them. " Of His fulness," said John, u we 
all received, and grace for grace." There seemed 
to be in Him a plenitude of vitality, from which 
health and vigour flowed into the lives of those 
who came near to Him. Nor does this seem to have 
been any mere physical magnetism; there is no in- 
timation that His physical endowments were ex- 
ceptional; the restoring and invigorating influence 
oftener flowed from a deeper source. The physical 
renewal came as the result of a spiritual quicken- 

[250] 



THE PRINCE OF LIFE 

ing. He reached the body through the soul. The 
order was first, "Thy sins be forgiven thee;" 
then, "Arise and walk." If the spirit is thoroughly 
alive, the body more quickly recovers its lost 
vigour. And it was mainly in giving peace to trou- 
bled consciences and rest to weary souls that He 
conferred upon those who had received Him the 
great boon of life. 

Thus Jesus proved Himself the w Prince of life." 
In the early ages of the church the Holy Spirit, the 
Comforter, came to be described as " the Lord and 
Giver of life;" but that was because He was be- 
lieved to be the continuator of the work of Jesus — 
the spiritual Christ. 

There seems to be in this conception a great and 
beautiful revelation of the essential nature of 
Christianity. There are many ways of conceiving 
of this, but I am not sure that any one of them is 
more significant than that which we are now con- 
sidering. Those words of Jesus to which I have 
before referred are wonderful words when we 
come to think upon them. They occur in that dis- 
course in which He describes Himself first as the 
Good Shepherd, and contrasts Himself with the 

[251] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

thieves and robbers who have been ravaging the 
flock. " The thief cometh not," He says, " but that 
he may steal and kill and destroy; I came that they 
may have life, and may have it abundantly." Have 
we not here the great fundamental distinction be- 
tween men — the line that separates the evil from 
the good, the just from the unjust, the sheep from 
the goats — that distinction which Jesus marks so 
clearly in His parable of judgment, and which 
must never, in our interpretations or philosophiz- 
ings, be blotted or blurred? Some are life-givers; 
some are life-destroyers. "The thief cometh not 
but that he may steal and kill and destroy; I came 
that they may have life, and may have it abun- 
dantly." 

I do not suppose that Jesus meant in this to de- 
clare that there is a large class of persons whose 
entire purpose it is to steal and kill and destroy; 
probably there are none so malevolent that they do 
not cherish some kindly impulses and perform 
some generous deeds. It is a distinction between 
acts, or perhaps between tendencies of character, 
that He is making. He speaks in the concrete, as 
He always does; but He expects us to make the 

[252] 



THE PRINCE OF LIFE 

proper application of His words. The fact to which 
He guides our thought is this — that there are 
ways of living, forms of conduct which are preda- 
tory and destructive of life, and other ways that 
tend to make life increase and abound. When Je- 
sus contrasts His own conduct, as one who gives 
life and gives it abundantly, with the thieves and 
robbers who steal and kill and destroy, we must in- 
terpret the conduct of those whom He thus de- 
scribes as destructive of life — as tending to the 
diminution of life. Indeed, it is a very deep and 
awful truth that all our social action tends in one 
or the other of these directions. Life, in its proper 
relation, is the one supreme and central good; the 
life of the body is the supreme good of the body; 
the life of the spirit is the supreme good of the 
spirit. And you can rightly estimate any act or 
habit or tendency of human conduct only by deter- 
mining whether it increases and invigorates the 
life of men, body and spirit, or whether it reduces 
or diminishes their life. Good men are adding to 
the life of those with whom they have to do; evil 
men are debilitating and depleting the life of those 
with whom they have to do. 

[253] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

Even in our economic relations the final effect of 
all our conduct upon those with whom we deal is 
to replenish or diminish their life. The wage ques- 
tion is at bottom a question of more or less life for 
the wage-worker. Starvation wages are wages by 
which the hold upon life of the wage-earner and 
his wife and his children is weakened. Systems of 
industry are good in proportion as they enlarge 
and invigourate the life of the whole population; 
evil, in proportion as they lessen and weaken its 
life. So all industrial and national policies are to be 
judged by the amount of life which they produce 
and maintain — life of the body and of the spirit. 
Those strong words of John Ruskin are the ever 
lasting truth : — 

There is no wealth but life — life, including all its 
powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country 
is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of 
noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, 
having perfected the functions of his own life to the ut- 
most, has also the widest helpful influence, both per- 
sonal and by means of his possessions, over the lives 
of others. 

We have here, as you see, the Christian concep- 
tion — the very word of the Prince of life, of Him 

[254] 



THE PRINCE OF LIFE 

who came that we might have life, and that we 
might have it abundantly. And when His kingdom 
has come, this will be the end for which wealth is 
sought and used in every nation. 

It is possible to use wealth so that it shall be pro- 
ductive of life; so that the entire administration of 
it shall tend to the enlargement and enrichment of 
the life of men; so that the labour which it em- 
ploys shall obtain an increasing share of the goods 
which it produces ; so that all the conditions under 
which that labour is performed shall be favourable 
to health and life and happiness; so that the spirit- 
ual life, also, of all who are employed shall be 
nourished by inspiring them with good-will and 
kindness, with the confidence in man which helps 
us to have faith in God. Such an administration of 
wealth is perhaps the very best testimony to the 
reality and the truth of the Christian religion 
which it is possible to bear in this day and genera- 
tion. One who handles capital with this clear pur- 
pose can do more to establish in the earth the King- 
dom of Heaven than any minister or missionary 
can do. 

But it is possible to use wealth in the opposite 

[255] 



THE NEW IDOLATRY 

way, so that it shall be destructive rather than pro- 
ductive of life. A man may manage his industry in 
such a way that the last possible penny shall be 
taken from wages and added to profit; in such a 
way that the health of his employees shall be im- 
paired and their happiness blighted and their hope 
taken away. He may do this while maintaining an 
outwardly religious behaviour and giving large 
sums to philanthropy. But such a handling of 
wealth does more to make infidels than any heret- 
ical teacher or lecturer ever did or can do. 

The fact needs to be noted that all the predatory 
schemes by which capital is successfully inflated 
and nefariously manipulated, and the community 
is thus burdened, are deadly attacks upon the life 
of the people. They filch away the earnings of the 
labouring classes. They increase the cost of rent 
and transportation and all the necessaries of life. 
They extort from the people contributions for 
which no equivalent has been given, of commodity 
or service. Thus the burden of toil is increased and 
the reward of industry is lessened for all who work; 
the surplus out of which life should be replenished 
is consumed, and the amount of life in the nation 

[256] 



THE PRINCE OF LIFE 

at large is lessened. Every one of those schemes of 
frenzied finance about which we are reading in 
these days is a gigantic bloodsucker, with ten mill- 
ion minute tentacles which it stealthily fastens 
upon the people who do the world's work, and 
each one of the victims must give up a little of his 
life for the aggrandizement of our financial titans. 
When such schemes flourish, by which men's gains 
are suddenly swollen to enormous proportions, 
somebody must be paying for it, and fife is always 
the final payment. It all comes out of the life of the 
people, who are producing the world's wealth. The 
plethora of the few is the depletion of the millions. 
In every great aggregation of workers, the faces of 
the underfed are a little paler, and the pulses of lit- 
tle children beat a little less joyously, and the feet 
are hastened that journey to the tomb — all be- 
cause of these who come to steal and to kill and to 
destroy. 

Such is the contrast between beneficent business 
and maleficent business. The good business em- 
ploys men, feeds them, clothes them, shelters 
them, generously distributes among them the 
goods that nourish life; the bad business contrives 

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THE NEW IDOLATRY 

to levy tribute on the resources out of which they 
are fed and clad and nourished, and thus enriches 
itself by impoverishing the life of the multitude. 

And I suppose that we should all find, whether 
we are engaged in what is called business or not, 
that the work which we are doing, the way in 
which we are spending our time and gaining our 
income, is tending either to the enlargement and 
increase of the life of those with whom we have to 
do or to the impoverishment and destruction of 
their life; and that this is the final test by which we 
must be judged — are we producers of life or de- 
stroyers, of life ? Is there more of life in the world 
— more of physical and of spiritual life — be- 
cause of what we are and of what we do, or is the 
physical and spiritual vitality of men lessened by 
what we are and by what we do ? Are we helping 
men to be stronger and sounder in body and mind 
and soul for the work of life, or are we making 
them feebler in muscle and will and moral 
stamina ? 

When Jesus Christ came into the world the civ- 
ilization prevailing — if such it could be called — 
was under the dominion of those who came to steal 

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THE PRINCE OF LIFE 

and to kill and to destroy. Rome was the world, 
and the civilization of Rome, with all its splendour, 
was at bottom a predatory civilization. It overran 
all its neighbours that it might subjugate and de- 
spoil them; its whole social system was based on a 
slavery in which the enslaved were merely chat- 
tels; the life of its ruling class was fed by the literal 
devouring of the lives of subject classes. Of course, 
this civilization was decadent. That terrible de- 
cline and fall which Gibbon has pictured was in 
full progress. It was in the midst of this awful 
scene that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea. 
Can any one doubt that His heart was full of 
divine compassion for those who were trampled 
on and preyed upon by the cruel and the strong, 
for those whose lives were consumed by the ava- 
rice and greed of their fellows ? What did He mean 
when, at the beginning of His ministry, in the 
synagogue where He had always worshipped, He 
took in His hand the roll of the Prophet Isaiah and 
read therefrom : " The Spirit of the Lord is upon 
Me, because He hath appointed Me to preach 
good tidings to the poor; He hath sent me to pro- 
claim release to the captives and recovery of sight 

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THE NEW IDOLATRY 

to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, 
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord " — 
adding, as He sat down, under the gaze of the con- 
gregation, " To-day hath this Scripture been ful- 
filled in your ears ? " What could He have meant 
but this, that it was His mission to change the en- 
tire current and tendency of human life; to put an 
end to the reign of the plunderers and the devour- 
ers; to chain the wolfish passion in human hearts 
which prompts men to steal and to kill and to de- 
stroy; to inspire them with His own divine passion 
to give life and to give it abundantly ? And is it not 
true that so far as men do receive of His fulness, so 
far as they are brought under the control of His 
spirit, they do cease to be destroyers and devourers 
of the bodies and souls of their fellows, and become 
helpers, saviours, life-bringers ? And is not this in- 
cluded in His meaning when He says : " I am come 
that they may have life, and that they may have 
it abundantly ? " 

To-day, then, we hail Him as Prince of life, the 
glorious Giver to men of the one supreme and 
crowning good. And the manner of the giving it is 
not hard to understand. He gives life by kindling in 

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THE PRINCE OF LIFE 

our hearts the flame of sacred love. Love is life. 
Love to God and man brings the soul into unity 
with itself; it is obeying its own organic law, and 
obedience to its law brings to any organism life and 
health and peace. If the spirit of Christ has be- 
come the ruling principle of our conduct, then we 
have entered into lif e, and it is a lif e that knows no 
term; it is the immortal life. If the spirit of Christ 
has entered into our lives, then in all our relations 
with others life is increased; we are by nature giv- 
ers of good; out of our lives are forever flowing 
healing, saving, restoring, vitalizing influences; 
and when all the members of the society in which 
we move have received this spirit and manifest it, 
there are none to bite and devour, to hurt or de- 
stroy; the predatory creatures have ceased their 
ravages, and the world rejoices in the plenitude of 
life which He came to bring. 

We hail Him, then, to-day, as the Lord and Giver 
of life. We desire to share with Him the unspeak- 
able gift, and to share it, as best we may, with all 
our fellow-men. What we freely receive from Him, 
we would freely give. What the whole world needs 
to-day is life, more life, fuller life, larger life. We 

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THE NEW IDOLATRY 

spend all our energies in heaping up the means of 
life, and never really begin to live; our strength is 
wasted, our health is broken, our intellects are im- 
poverished, our affections are withered, our peace 
is destroyed in our mad devotion to that which is 
only an adjunct or appendage of life. Oh, if we 
could only understand how good a thing it is to 
live, just to live, truly and freely and largely and 
nobly, to live the life that is life indeed ! 

Shall we not draw near to this Prince of life and 
take from Him the gift He came to bring ? Is not 
this the one thing needful ? We are reading and 
hearing much in these days of the simple life. 
What is it but the life into which they are led who 
take the yoke of this Master upon them and learn 
of Him ? It is a most cheering omen that this little 
book of Pastor Wagner's is falling into so many 
hands and uttering its ingenuous and persuasive 
plea before so many minds and in so many homes. 
If we heed it, it must bring us back to the simplic- 
ity of Christ. Pastor Wagner is only preaching over 
the Sermon on the Mount; it is nothing but the 
teaching of Jesus brought down to this day and 
applied to the conditions of our complex civiliza- 

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THE PRINCE OF LIFE 

tion. It is the true teaching; none of us can doubt 
it. And I wish that we could all begin the new year 
with the earnest purpose to put ourselves under the 
leadership of this Prince of life. I know that we 
should find His yoke easy and His burden light, 
and that there would be rest for our souls in the 
paths into which He would lead us. We should 
know if we shared His life, that we were really liv- 
ing; and we should know also that we were helping 
others to live; that we were doing what we could to 
put an end to the ravages of the destroyers and the 
devourers, and to fill the earth with the abundance 
of peace. 

Is not this, fellow-men, the right way to live ? 
Does not all that is deepest and divinest in you 
consent to this way of life into which Jesus Christ 
is calling us, as the right way, the royal way, the 
blessed way ? Choose it, then, with all the energy of 
your volition, and walk on in it with a glad heart 
and a hope that maketh not ashamed. 

THE END 



THE McCLURE PRESS, NEW YORK 

[263] 



NOV 29 1905 



